Disentangling the Urban Soundscape: Spatiotemporal Variability and Source Attribution
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Urban noise is often dismissed as a nuisance, yet growing evidence links environmental noise—particularly from transportation sources—to adverse health outcomes including sleep disturbance, cognitive impairment, and cardiovascular disease. The World Health Organization has identified environmental noise as the second most important environmental stressor in Western Europe after air pollution. Despite this, relatively little work has quantitatively attributed urban noise to its underlying sources using top-down, data-driven approaches.
As part of the Green Heart Louisville project, we collected approximately 11,000 hours of environmental audio across multiple urban sites and seasons using Class I sound level meters paired with continuous recording. Machine-learning methods that map both text labels and audio signals into shared semantic embeddings were applied to the audio data to identify and apportion noise sources. A Contrastive Language–Audio Pretraining model identified likely sources, while Language-Queried Audio Source Separation estimated each source’s contribution to noise energy at four-second resolution. Results illustrate how AI-enabled audio analysis can inform targeted urban noise mitigation strategies.
Dr. Jay Turner is a Professor of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He also serves as the James McKelvey Professor of Engineering Education, Vice Dean for Education, and the inaugural Head of the Division of Engineering Education. In addition, he is an Associate in Environmental Science & Engineering at Harvard University.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Turner’s research has focused on air quality characterization, including field measurements, laboratory analysis, and data analysis to support air quality management, regulatory decision-making, and exposure studies. More recently, his research group has expanded its work to examine environmental heat and noise exposures in urban environments.
Dr. Turner is a past president of the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR) and served for six years on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.