Get Involved!
How you or your group can contribute a soundscape.

We welcome groups and individuals of all kinds to help sound-map their communities. MySoundscape provides learning material at different grade levels (early elementary, middle, and high school), and measurements can be made with flexibility to available time, proximity, and group size. 

The main reward is a better understanding of how audio plays its part in the environment.  Teachers have used MySoundscape as the basis of school projects. And students have used MySoundscape for individual projects and science fair entries. See other modes of involvement below.

• Teacher in Classroom - High school teachers of elective science and technology classes usually teach a class on environmental audio from the grade-targeted education material included* and then assign the students to sound-map their community in the following week or two. Organization is important here for the students to choose nearby parks or parts of a nature conservancy or hiking trail, and to choose specific sites for each student to complete the sound map without omissions or redundancy.

• High School Science and Environment Clubs - This is similar to the teach-in-classroom model.

• Girl Scout, Scouting America, and Other Youth Groups - These groups are often looking for field trips and community involvement. The environmental audio lesson might be less rigorous than for the high school groups, but the program might consist of a single meeting to discuss environmental audio from the grade-targeted education material included* as well as organization for the field trip. The field trip might happen after the meeting or at a separate meeting. For instance, the group could meet at a park or hiking trail and map different locations.

• Camps - Camps often include STEM components, and MySoundscape is perfect for this. One model is to have a fixed time each week for the campers to congregate. An outdoor lesson, high in interaction, is taught, and then the group goes out into their campgrounds to sound-map.

• Wildlife and Conservation Sites - Environmental sound is an indicator of the health of a wildlife area, and preservation of good environmental health is one of the primary purposes of education at these locations. Just as for the camp model, teaching and field trip are both done close to nature. Part of the field trip might add sound measurement to biological observation and measurement. Bird, amphibian, insect  and environmental sounds are particular to different ecosystems; listening is an important part to learning ecosystem personalities.

• Service Groups - The goal of many youth service groups is to provide benefit to the community. Local parks and nature areas certainly benefit the community, and the MySoundscape maps highlight these sites while providing a map of locations.

• Science Fair Participants - Soundscapes are measured for reasons related to environmental and human health. A science fair participant might design a project not only to capture sound data, but to correlate it with different factors as ecosystem type, tree buffering of sound, closeness to roadways, etc.

• Individuals - Individuals have also taken MySoundscape measurements, often on trips, for many reasons such as to heighten their perception of a new area, to add a different dimension to photographs on a trip, or for curiosity of how, for instance, the loud crashing of waves at an oceanfront can be calming, the level of cicadas on a summer afternoon can be disregarded, a wind turbine sounds up close, or nighttime at a lakeside can be close to silent.

* Note that the lesson part of the program can be accomplished in many ways. We provide grade-targeted lecture material that a teacher can use as a guide, or students can use directly. We have also taught lessons in person, either via a video conference or on-site. Just ask.