School of Physics, Engineering and Technology
Objective Soundscapes
Automated Soundscape Analysis and Identification
The term “soundscape” has been used for many years to describe the total sounds in a landscape. However, the majority of work has been on human and musical interpretation. There are many applications where a more objective analysis of soundscape is required, eg for noise pollution studies and determining acoustic biodiversity.
The research being undertaken here is to consider soundscape (acoustic landscape) as a multiscale spatio-temporal overlapping mosaic of acoustic signals overlaid onto a landscape. Techniques developed in other research projects (urban sound recognition, bioacoustic species identification) will be employed in conjunction with formal methods such as description logics and formal concept analysis to obtain syntactic descriptions of the sound structure over time.
The main target soundscapes will be:
- local nature reserves for biodiversity assessment
- long term change monitoring.
