The Sublime Ordinary: A Tool for Analysing Temporal City Soundscapes

As cities hurtle toward ever more data-driven futures, The Sublime Ordinary offers an alternative perspective on how we record, understand, and ultimately design urban environments by examining the temporal and sensory dimensions of city life from a first-person perspective. Through a multimodal dataset of synchronized audio, video, and GPS recordings collected in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the project analyzes how the rhythms of everyday urban life shift over time and in response to policy and environmental changes. By combining semantic segmentation (SegFormer), object detection (YOLO), and sound classification (YAMNet), our system generates linked spatial–temporal–acoustic representations that form the data foundation of a new notational language informed by graphic notation to visualize the interplay of sound, activity, and place. Presented as an interactive web interface, the work enables users to explore recurring sound profiles and similarities between locations—asking: which city block sounds most like another, and how does its acoustic identity change over time? Engaging the NeurIPS Creative AI theme of Humanity, it examines how human and machine perception complement one another in a shared authorship that enables a more sensory, human-centered understanding of urban environments.