White Noise: The Sound of Gentrification
We most often recognize gentrification by changes to the appearance of a neighborhood: renovated real estate, emerging local businesses catering to new racial and socioeconomic demographics, and new construction. Less obvious, but divisive and disruptive, are changes to the sonic landscape of an urban neighborhood as it undergoes gentrification. Shifts in population are often accompanied by a surge in noise complaints made to the city. On the one hand, new inhabitants can find the music and culture of longtime residents to be disruptive and unfamiliar, while on the other hand, new construction projects produce noise that can violate city quality of life regulations. Our research juxtaposes noise complaints available from open government data, urban displacement maps, and field recordings from cities all over the United States to give a fuller sensory experience of this transformation. Exploring the criminalization of noise, the impulse to silence residents, and the disruptive din from ongoing construction, this project is an ongoing effort to record, preserve, and analyze the sound of a neighborhood as it undergoes rapid change.
Taken from NYC OpenData
Sonic information& Data
NYC, Pittsburg, Kansas City, Boston, & Chicago are capturing noise complaint information through their open city data projects.
Photo by Peter Heeling form Pexels
Loss of community sounds
As a community we capture, "clean" and label this data to reflect the loss of local sounds, increase in construction sounds and identification of changing soundscapes across our city.
Photo by Kaique Rocha from Pexels
sound preservation
In this project we can observe patterns of gentrification in other cities, and start to design for our own neighborhood specific data collection here in Los Angeles, rules and final AI Design project. Our AI design research focuses on how to preserve neighborhood specific sounds.