Achievement

The Media for Sustainability interdisciplinary group continues to analyze our auditory world through the analysis and re-synthesis of naturally occurring soundscapes. Our efforts resulted in a large number of publications in competitive, high profile venues including IEEE ICASSP, WASPAA, and IEEE Trans. ASLP. We released the SIRENS open-source software for analysis of environmental sounds, which is being used to develop a hardware device in collaboration with Intel Corp. for audio life-logging, where a lifetime of sound can be continuously recorded and easily accessed. We also created the website soundwalks.org where geographically-labeled, user-contributed sounds allow listeners to experience the activity of a place through sound. We have been invited to found a local chapter of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology and hope that the soundwalks.org community will be useful for the study of urban planning as users gain awareness of how their actions influence the environment.