"Ten years ago, Fristrup set out to measure an important natural resource - the amount of silence in national parks. He eventually realized it would take forever to actually make recordings throughout all the parks, so he used a computer program to model loudness across the country. He uploaded all the audio he already had (over a million hours of sound from 546 recording sites) along with environmental data - proximity to roads, the type of vegetation, any nearby topographical features that might act as sound barriers etc. The computer “learned” how all these factors interacted to create a specific sound level, and then predicted loudness everywhere." - Todd Hoff