The infrasonic choir: Decoding songs to inform decisions

The world around us is continuously evolving due to the actions of Mother Nature and anthropogenic activities, which impacts the decisions made on how we interact with the environment. Many of these changes are observable by listening to the infrasonic choir around us everyday. The voices of the infrasound choir include a wide variety of both natural (e.g., surf and volcanic activity) and man-made ( e.g., explosions and infrastructure) sources. Understanding how to exploit the infrasonic song to make sense of the environment in near-real-time is the focus of ongoing research. An example of this is listening to infrastructure (bridges and dams) for insights into structural health, which can be utilized to prioritize limited resources after a natural disaster (hurricane or earthquake). This presentation explores operationalizing this capability, such as how to monitor source rich urban spaces, re-envisioning sensing in these environments with the development of lightweight/low-cost sensors and mobile arrays, and developing detection, classification, and localization methods for near-real-time processing. When successful, continuous monitoring of the infrasonic choir can provide a method for understanding the environment to inform decisions. Permission to publish was granted by the Director, Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.