Comparing Human and AI Soundscapes

How do we understand ourselves and our community through sound?

How does AI describe our community through sound?

What do we notice about our community when AI describes its sounds?

Overview

This lesson on sound journals, community, and placemaking invites students to compare the way they describe their community with the way AI describes their community. The lesson has three main activities. Click on the links below to jump to each activity.

Part I: Sound Journal Activity

Part II: Class Created Collage of Community Soundscapes

Part III: Comparing the Collective Soundscape to an AI Generated Soundscape

Extension and Connections: Soundscapes Around Town

Creating Homeplace or (re)Generating Sites of Exclusion?

This lesson is inspired from the excerpted section below from Stephanie Smith Budhai’s and Marie Heath’s book, Critical AI in K-12 Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Teaching Justice and Joy. In this section of the book they celebrate the joy of Black community homeplace-making, noting that collective and embodied memory is essential to the practice. They contrast the aliveness, community, and creativity necessary to creating homeplaces of freedom against the predictive algorithms and encoded oppression of AI generated descriptions of community.

“From the slave ship, to the plantation, to prisons and ghettos, Black people have always created homeplaces of freedom inside of sites designed by whiteness in order to convey captivity. McKittrick (2006) argues that the Black geography—the way Blackness rewrites place as alive with community, collective memory, and shaped by blood and bones — offers a powerful counter to the master narrative of geography as ordered and fixed borders of lines and rivers and zip codes and nations: the containment of people and land. In practice, this radical space making has looked like the Maroon communities living on the margins of slavery or the Black Panther’s community organized social services inside of segregated and ghettoized Black communities. In each of these spaces, McKittrick contends that Black people have long contested the dominant narratives of citizenship, belonging, and subjugation of marginalized peoples.

We think it is imperative that students and teachers consider the way genAI embeds and reproduces the cartographies of whiteness. We wrote earlier…about the ways that AI operates behind a screen of perceived objectivity while quietly reproducing racism. Here, we invite…teachers to guide students in an investigation of their own communities and sites of homeplace, first in the analogue and then through the digital use of generative AI, in order to compare and ask questions about how genAI might shape understanding of community. Depending on the age of students and the content [area], teachers can draw parallels between historic homeplaces and current homeplaces, and then investigate homeplace in their own lives and community.”

From Budhai, S. S. & Heath, M. K. (2025). Critical AI in K-12 Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Teaching Justice and Joy. Harvard Education Press. pp.

Image of Sound Journal Document

Part I: Sound Journal Activity

What

do we notice about our day when we listen to it?

  1. Model how to create a sound journal. Students can write down sounds or record sounds.

  2. Ask students to spend a day adding entries to their sound journal.

  3. Lead students in individual or small group reflections to begin to notice the different sounds in their lives. You could ask: Whose voices are present? What are the loudest sounds you hear?What are the quietest sounds you hear? What are the times when the day is louder?What are the times when the day is more quiet? What do you hear the most during your day? Maybe you hear mostly people? Or music? Or vehicles? Or animal sounds? Or something else?

  4. Lead students in individual or small group reflections about how different sounds make them feel. You could ask: What is your favorite part of your day? How did it sound during that time? What sounds make you worry? What are the sounds of comfort? What sounds make you feel excited?

Sound Journal Handout

Part II: Create a Collage of Soundscapes

What do we notice about our community when we listen to it?

  1. Students work together as a whole class to model the soundscape of their community. This whole class project could take many forms.

    • Make a word cloud of the sounds they hear every day

    • Draw or cut out pictures of sounds, and tape them on a wall in the classroom, or on a school bulletin board.

    • Map their sounds onto a oversized political or physical map of the community served by the school. This could also be a digital mapping using uploads of recorded sounds overlaid on a digital map.

    • Create a podcast of recorded sounds. Invite the students to suggest how the sounds should be organized. Would they prefer to order the sounds chronologically (e.g. all morning sounds from all students, then all school day sounds)? Would they like to order the sounds by decibel level (e.g. group the quiet sounds together, group the loud sounds together)? Could they group the sounds by feeling (e.g. sounds that bring joy, sounds that cause anxiety)?

    • Create a collage of written or drawn sounds. Like the podcast, invite students to suggest how the sounds should be organized.

  2. Lead the students in a reflection of the collage and the processes and choices they used to create it.

  3. Give each student 3 sticky notes. Ask them to name three adjectives that describe their community. Write each on a sticky note. Add each note to the collage.

  4. Lead students in a discussion around the question, “What do we notice about our community when we listen to it?

Part III: Compare the Collective Soundscape to an AI Generated Soundscape

  1. Prompt a generative AI to describe what it might hear during the day in your school community zipcode(s).

  2. Ask students what do they notice, and what do they wonder, about the ways AI described their neighborhoods.

  3. Lead students in a discussion to compare and contrast the AI soundscape and the class soundscape.

  4. Ask students to hypothesize why the soundscapes may be similar or different.

  5. Create a student list of their wonders about the AI technology.

sillouhettes of humans in a huddle

Extension: Soundscapes Around Town

How do other communities describe themselves through sound?

  1. Ask other schools in the area to complete Parts I-III of this activity.

  2. Take a field trip, host a video conference meet-up, or organize a traveling community visit night to compare soundscapes, AI generated soundscapes, and wonders about AI technologies.