Soundproofist

Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan has a long and diverse history.  It could be described as an "East Side - West Side" story, because the neighborhood -- divided by Broadway -- is starkly different on each side.  Lucina Chavez-Rosique began measuring and documenting the decibel levels across the neighborhood. She's collecting noise data and resident stories to measure the  impact of noise on the community from a ...

Topher White uses technology to detect illegal logging in rainforests. You might have seen stories about how he repurposed old cellphones and powered them with solar panels to listen remotely in the forests. While collecting this audio data, he uses AI tools to identify the specific sounds of chainsaws and trucks to send alerts to local officials.

His organization, Rainforest Connection, has been successful in reducing ill...

Imagine hearing loud gunfire in your home or school all day long. A community in Cranston, Rhode Island has struggled with this issue for the past few years, and they're protesting against it.  Their local police department practices at an outdoor shooting range across the street from a residential neighborhood and a high school. The target practice at that range has increased up to 12 hours per day. Longtime residents are pus...

When New York City resident and urban planner Jimin Park found herself surrounded by urban noise, she decided to do something constructive about it. She created an app called "Right Avenues," which residents can use to file noise complaints to 311 and identify the type of noise and the location so that it can be tracked on a map and viewed by the public. Ultimately the app can be used to aggregate noise data for problem-s...

In this second episode of the "Ask Arline" series, New York City psychologist and noise expert Dr. Arline Bronzaft answers some questions about urban environmental noise.  We cover cars with exceptionally loud engines to people blasting loudspeakers late at night, and bars and clubs with outdoor noise that keeps people awake. Dr. Bronzaft shares some of the solutions that get used in New York, and which might be applicabl...

New York City psychologist and noise expert Dr. Arline Bronzaft answers some questions about neighbor noise.  In the first episode of this mini-series from Soundproofist, Dr. Bronzaft answers common concerns about how to deal with neighbors who stomp their feet overhead, noise from romping children while you're trying to work from home, how to delicately approach neighbors with loud bedroom activities when you're trying t...

During the height of the COVID pandemic, human-generated ocean noise from freight shipping and recreational boating nearly stopped. Because some locales measure oceanic noise with hydrophones, open-source data offered lots of useful raw data. Artash Nath, a student researcher, analyzed some of this data to demonstrate how ocean noise impacts marine mammals and by what measure the noise was reduced when human activity stopped. He sh...

Residents of India's vibrant and populous cities experience loud noise that can damage their health. We spoke with  Sumaira Abdulali, a leader in environmental and noise issues in the state of Maharashtra. For over 20 years, she's advocated for residents of Mumbai and other cities and helped to implement policy change. As a result, her work has improved the quality of life for millions of people. In this podcast episode, ...

Imagine if 160 helicopters flew over your home every day. That's what many residents of New York City experience. And the noise is disrupting their sleep, parks and recreation, and even pedestrian and bicyclist safety.  Soundproofist talked with representatives from Stop the Chop NY/NJ -- an organization that's working to legislate guidelines to manage a growing number of non-essential helicopter flights over the most den...

Cities and communities have their own sound markers, as Dr. Kenya Williams points out. Dr. Williams is an urban planner, an acoustic ecologist, and an advisor to Quiet Parks International. He founded his company, "Hush Soundscape Planning & Design," in 2012. 

In  episode 22 of Soundproofist, Dr. Williams shares his journey from making mixtapes and producing music to becoming an urban planner and soundscape ex...

Jessie Oliver designs citizen science research projects so that participants feel engaged, make meaningful contributions, and have fun. In this interview, she describes some of the considerations for a citizen science project, and about a challenge she's working on in Australia: to collect data on the endangered Eastern bristlebird. If you're curious about getting involved in citizen science, or you want to know more the ...

A team of audio specialists at Goldsmiths, University of London joined Soundproofist to discuss their fascinating soundscape project. After digitizing some historic 1928 recordings of London street noises, they return to the exact same sites to record the street sounds again. They've made these newer recordings on the same day in September and at the same time of day as the original recordings, starting in 2008. What have they...

You don't need a large budget to measure and map sound. Dr. Tae Hong Park, a professor at NYU, founded the Citygram soundmap project and launched a new airplane-noise tracker project called "Get Noisy." In this interview, he shares details of how he built affordable microphones that can be attached to a window. They send data to your computer through a web browser. His concept is "use what you already have."...