“Cassandra in front of the burning city of Troy” by Evelyn de Morgan (1898)
I started out last week in a three-hour International Standards Organization (ISO) meeting with a bunch of physicists and biologists defining and codifying underwater acoustics terminology used in research and international environmental regulations.
OCR has been an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) delegate to the ISO for over a decade now. My interest in metrics and terminology sprung out of a paper we put together in 2008 establishing a correlation between marine animal auditory thresholds, and a set of ocean ambient noise curves, called the “Wenz Curves.”
Our research involved parsing hundreds of papers expressing what various animals could hear. In these papers we found that noise exposure metrics were all over the map – there were no less than nine different ways of expressing what sound level reaches a subject animal. Some of these we could reconcile using simple math, but we had to throw 20% of the reference papers out because the exposure metrics didn’t make any sense. These were all “peer reviewed” papers, no less…
This was when I figured out that participating in metrics clarification was somewhere I might make a contribution.
So how did it come to pass that I was in that particular ISO meeting last week? And why is it important? Five years ago I was in another ISO meeting and suggested that we come up with underwater acoustics terminology for “Soundscape” analysis. “Soundscape” is such a general term, and unlike physics, does not lend itself to metric definition. In order to use it in science, it needs to be unpacked and tied to quantifiable data. For this reason, initially my ISO colleagues were reluctant to take it on.
But five years later, particularly after the dramatic changes in global soundscapes due to the pandemic, “soundscape analysis” is ‘all the rage’ because, as I had predicted five years before, soundscape density and texture are great proxies for environmental health. Now we in the ISO committee are rushing to catch up.
The legacy of my work is peppered with these sorts of stories. I often feel a bit like Cassandra, not being believed while trying to convey ideas before their time, and then having the satisfaction of finally seeing them implemented. While usually without much attribution, it is good to see harmonization in research, practice, impacts, and the metric tools being used to express them all.
