Research has shown that certain natural sounds have beneficial physical, mental, and cognitive health impacts. Starting with this prompt, we hope to collaboratively gather sounds in our environment. Through the course of the year-long project, participants will learn how to design research projects and methods to gather, analyze, interpret, and visualize data in a variety of ways.
About the project
We will create a detailed sound data map of the region, look for patterns, and provide a valuable open-source resource for researchers, ecologists, scientists, sound artists, and policy-makers. Using AI, we will look for complex and hidden connections. Can we find a soundscape signature for each neighborhood? Or Portland? Can we see a correlation between certain sounds and health? Or pollution? Or find a new previously unrecorded creature?
We will clean, catalog, and share (with privacy) the dataset next summer and at the end of the project. We plan to hold sessions where we analyze the data in a variety of ways and teach some data analysis, AI/ML analytic methods, as well as a variety of ways to map, visualize and tell stories with the data, and use it for creative exploration for sound/installation artists.
Through these datawalks, mapping, analysis and storytelling, workshops on sound, data, and mapping, we will build fluency and expertise amongst a diverse community to use the powerful tools of data analytics and interpretation to tell their own stories, create their own innovative tools, and advocate for resources and policies around environmental justice and community health.
Who is this for
Anyone interested in collectively building open environmental datasets of our region, in close observation of the environment around us, in understanding the process of science and environmental research to affect our climate future and in finding hidden patterns amongst complex environmental datasets. We welcome artists, ecologists, community members, organizers, futurists, policymakers, students, educators, data scientists, researchers, technologists, engineers, designers, and innovators.
May2026
Theme: Bees, insects, and frogs
April 2026
Theme: Birds
March 2026
Theme: Equinox
February 2026
Theme: Above or below
January 2026
Theme: Indoor sounds
December 2025
- We will hold online info session for the project on Thursday, December 4 at 1 PM. Bring questions, ideas, and curiosity
- On December 21, we will launch the project officially, encouraging you to wander and record and share the sounds you hear.
August 2025
- We began this project to learn more and collaboratively finalize the design of the research and data gathering before we embark on gathering the sounds of the region.
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