Purdue's Discovery Park launches global soundscapes research center to capture vanishing sounds of nature

October 29, 2014  


Bryan Pijanowski Soundscapes

Forestry and natural resources professor Bryan Pijanowski, director of Purdue's newly launched Center for Global Soundscapes, captures the sounds of nature while conducting research on the island of Borneo in southeast Asia this spring. The goal of the Discovery Park center is to use natural sounds as a tool to preserve natural soundscapes for determining environmental habitat changes by species. (Purdue University photo/Bryan Pijanowski)
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University ecologist Bryan Pijanowski gained international attention for an Earth Day effort to capture soundscapes from citizen scientists. Now, he is launching a research center aimed at preserving the sounds of the Earth and highlighting their bellwether role in alerting scientists to environmental habitat changes by species.

Through the new Center for Global Soundscapes in Purdue's Discovery Park, the forestry and natural resources professor and his research team will examine how animals interact - even across species - amid global habitat modification as well as develop science-related K-12 education curriculum materials.

"There may be some very unique soundscapes around the world that, through normal human activities, could be lost forever," Pijanowski said. "The environmental, social and economical stakes are extremely high, because missing or altered voices in our natural soundscapes tend to indicate broader environmental problems."

For the Record the Earth event on April 22, Pijanowski partnered with international collaborators and media outlets to encourage the general public citizen researchers to capture natural sound recordings and upload them for preservation during Earth Day 2014.

Since then, more than 2,100 natural sounds and counting have been uploaded from over 100 countries with the technological assistance of mobile device apps for iPhone, https://www.apple.com/itunes, and Google Play for Android devices, https://play.google.com/store.

Center for Global Sounscapes

Forestry and natural resources professor Bryan Pijanowski, director of Purdue's newly launched Center for Global Soundscapes, captures natural sounds on campus with his research team, from left, Maryam Ghadiri, Buddhika Madurapperuma, Kristen Bellisario, Amandine Gasc, Matt Harris and Jarrod Doucette. (Purdue University photo/Steven Yang) 
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"The mission is to sonify the Internet with nature's wondrous sounds," Pijanowski said. "We hope to use these collected soundscapes to change the sound of public spaces, hospitals and other venues, replacing them with sounds that make us feel good, sounds that are peaceful and restful."

In addition to Record the Earth, which Pijanowski hopes will become an annual Earth Day activity, the Discovery Park center will collaborate with partners at Purdue and across the globe in the sciences, engineering, humanities and other areas to advance this 3-year-old research field by:

* Producing a digital theater IMAX show that will combine visual and acoustic elements gathered, filmed and recorded by Pijanowski and his fellow soundscapes researchers.

* Launching a series of education modules, tablet course packs and online courses, specifically geared for students in grades 5-7 and their teachers, where broad concepts of macro sciences and acoustics are introduced in schools nationwide. This project element, called Your Ecosystem Learning Laboratories, or YELLs, includes research efforts by Pijanowski and fellow Purdue researcher Dan Shepardson, a professor of curriculum and instruction and earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences.

* Creating an iListen website, which is designed to connect YELLs as well as theater and mobile applications. The website will include links to related research, a growing library of soundscape recordings, and other tools for teaching and learning more about the field.

Already, Pijanowski has a library of 500,000 natural recordings from sites in Indiana, Costa Rica (La Selva Biological Station), Sonoran Desert (Arizona), Borneo (University of Brunei Darussalam Research Station), Maine (from the Wells National Estuarine Reserve) and elsewhere.

Another goal of the Discovery Park center is to educate and promote how natural soundscapes foster a sense of place and that emotional bond between humans and nature.

"All around us, at all times of the day and night, animals from ants, elephants and bats to baboons, lions and birds are participating in orchestration, a key measure of biodiversity," he said.

"We are using signals, like a detective, to discover what these sounds are all about, to identify species that we heard before and are now silent, missing or moved on. If we lose these species, we lose them forever. I call it the acoustic heritage of saving our planet."

Go to http://www.purdue.edu/soundscapes to hear some of Pijanowski's recorded natural sounds.

Researchers working with the Center for Global Soundscapes also will expand the vocabulary for the field of soundscapes ecology. To do this, they will establish terminology and borrow terms from related disciplines such as "biophony" (the sounds created by organisms) and "geophony" (the sounds of non-biological entities such as wind and thunder).

To launch the center, Pijanowski has received $3 million in funding in recent years from the National Science Foundation, Purdue's Office of Vice President for Research, Discovery Park, Purdue's Center for the Environment, the Envision Center, Information Technology at Purdue (iTAP) and other partners.

In 2011, Pijanowski and a team of researchers in science, music and psychology launched the Global Sustainable Soundscapes Network with an initial $500,000 grant from the NSF's Coupled Natural-Human Systems Program. Pijanowski and Catherine Guastavino, an associate professor of information studies at McGill University in Montréal, are the project's co-principal investigators.

The researchers are coordinating soundscape monitoring sites to collect acoustic data from the Kenai Wildlife Refuge on the Alaskan Kenai Peninsula; the Midwest Temperate Ecosystems in the Aldo Leopold Reserve of central Wisconsin; the Sonoran Desert Region including biodiversity rich areas of the Madrean Sky Islands; tidal marsh ecosystems of Maine; the Borneo Equatorial Rainforest in Brunei; and Mediterranean chaparral of Tuscany, Italy.

Purdue's Center for the Environment in Discovery Park funded a seed project in 2006 to support ecological acoustics research at Purdue and to develop a prototype acoustic observation system. This was used to demonstrate the capacity for obtaining acoustic measurements to quantify and interpret biological activity across a landscape. 

Writer: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu

Source: Bryan Pijanowski, 765-496-2215, bpijanow@purdue.edu

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUkjxLohf54

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