This field recording was used in the 2025 sound installation for the project, Sounding Data Justice, presented at York College of the City University of New York in Jamaica, Queens. The recording was captured at the Idlewild Park Preserve and Environmental Science Learning Center in Springfield Gardens, Queens, NYC, on May 22, 2025, between 12:33PM and 4:30PM. AKG C-1000 microphones and a Tascam DR-40X recorder with 24bit 48kHz resolution were used. The spectrogram in the thumbnail image that accompanies this page was generated using the Librosa library in Python. It displays decibel (dB) intensity on a logarithmic scale with the "gray" colormap.

The sound installation was part of a larger event on September 18, 2025, at which, Eastern Queens Alliance Inc. (EQA), community partner on the Sounding Data Justice project, presented findings from citizen science research on aircraft noise and air quality conditions in Southeast Queens. EQA runs the Idlewild Environmental Science Learning Center where it gathers, manages and interprets community data on aircraft noise and air quality conditions.

Aircraft Noise from Southeast Queens

Sounding Data Justice for Environmental Liberation in Southeast Queens initiated university-based, transdisciplinary support for a community-run digital justice initiative in data literacy, data ethics and environmental awareness with the Eastern Queens Alliance, Inc. (EQA), a federation of civic associations in pollution-burdened Southeast Queens. In response to EQA's interest in art-science initiatives, it transformed data into sound to develop new ways of sharing air quality and aircraft noise data that EQA gathers, controls, manages and interprets. In workshops and listening sessions with community members, it sonified extrapolated values to explore correlations between measurements for a community-grounded, public college-facilitated art-science effort to grow data literacy and foster environmental equity through liberation science and ecological art.

Sounding Data Justice is a 2024-2025 an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Seed Grant project. The ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant program supports digital projects across the humanities and interpretative social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.