Help with project: Multi-Mic Setup that continually listens, recording and saving all instances of noise above ambience

[u/degen98800]

Hi there! ^-^

I am working on a college project; the main task is to find some menial, trivial or otherwise unnoticed type of 'signal', going unnoticed precisely because of its randomness, abundance/saturation, and thus the brains natural tendency to adaptively pay no mind to it. The next step would then be to gather enough recorded instances of XYZ to turn them into data, analyze them and chart them. The objective isn't to find patterns and then present them as some sort of discovery, it is explicitly to demonstrate how easy it is to..

A. impose arbitrary categories, ones that may be essentially identical, but the fact that one is looking at such a specific, non-specific 'thing' with such discriminating precision gives an invitation to maximize very menial differences.

B. find trends, correlation or causality through sheer volume of data points, whether there is or isn't anything present.

It was rather easy for me to decide that I would just pick.. noise - which essentially IS what was outlined in the task, so this is not exactly a decision . But I thought of very literal, audio(-visual) noise. I live in a very thin-walled and well-populated multi-story building, so sounds of all kinds (bangs, loud thumps, people stepping so hard that I start suspecting a sumo ringer is living above me..) are plentiful and, importantly, generally impersonal and meaningless.

So that's the cause + use case.

What i imagined was running my main Tower PC as a sort of hub that runs 24/7, with multiple microphones permanently on and listening, but only actually recording / saving anything to my hard drive when they do pick up something; this would force me to repeadetly find a noise floor, which might be the biggest problem, since without manual intervention it does not occur to me how I could automate the differentiation between eg. loud thumping (quantifiable, in the most basic sense) and an old fridge beggining to run a cooling cycle, buzzing continously for minutes, then turning quiet again..

I would want these to be very sensitive in the low dB range, even very low volume stuff should be clear and distinguishable when played back later. The microphones should also be directional and narrow at that, since I lack any location to run all this at, other than my own apartment. And seeing as I still want to move around in it, it would be cool if eg. me turning around in Bed didn't instantly completely crowd out everything else.

Advice for what type of setup would work for this is very appreciated, whether it be suggestions for affordable microphones, software solutions or other advice to help me get this thing on the road. Optimally all of the above of course, but anything helps as I have not done anything even remotely similar in my life, you can also dm me if you prefer I don't mind.

I'm totally open for compromise in any area, I am aware that this was more of a wishlist than hard criteria, but I don't know what I don't know so I haven't got a clue of the limitations or possibilities yet. Forgive me if it's a ridiculous proposition as it is standing now T^T

Thanks <3

[u/Lichtwald]

How many mics do you think you want? What's the distance from your pc?

Writing a python script to do this (and even running a classifier model on top) would be pretty straightforward, but you're not going to hear nearly as interesting things inside with the whirr of a computer.

As far as inexpensive mics, so long as your audio input supports Plug in Power (PiP) then the cheapest way to go are any of the small electrets like clippy mics from micboosters. There's a half dozen companies around that sell similar things (serious mics, verde, sonorous objects, etc.)