Heard Once

Sample Coverage and the Number of Unheard Sound Sources in a Soundwalk Inventory

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions treats the list of sounds a soundwalk produces as a sample and estimates what it missed. Twenty-four listeners walking one route through a covered market hall wrote down 118 kinds of sound source, 24 of them listed by one listener only; an incidence-based lower-bound estimator puts the number audible at 134.2, so that at least sixteen kinds went unrecorded, at a sample coverage of 0.968. Recoding the same entries more coarsely and more finely moves the richness estimate nearly fivefold while coverage stays between 0.946 and 0.990, and the paper recommends that soundwalk inventories be reported and compared by coverage.

@misc{slop_rwfe7f,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Vigdis Emenike},
  title        = {Heard Once: Sample Coverage and the Number of Unheard Sound Sources in a Soundwalk Inventory},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.rwfe7f},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-estimating-how-many-rwfe7f/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}