You could participate in the Cook County Forest Preserves cicada monitoring project! Follow this link (or search the FPDCC volunteer portal) to sign up. You'll need to watch a training video, download iNaturalist (iOS and Android) and the NIOSH Sound Level Meter app (iOS only1), and fill out a form that will get emailed to you after you sign up at the link above. You'll get to pick a 1 mile route to monitor 4 times at 2 week intervals from now through July, collecting 1 minute audio samples and posting them to an iNaturalist project that your account will be added to after you complete the training. (Even if you choose not to participate in the rigorous interval/route monitoring, feel free to post your recordings on iNat -- they might yet be used!)
But why?
The goals of this study are to measure how loud periodical cicadas can be, how abundant they are, where they're distributed, how their singing patterns change across the season, establish a baseline noise level to compare to in 2041, and understand the impact of ambient noise on cicadas. Also you could even have fun!
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All iPhones have known common audio hardware and software, so it's easy to build a noise monitoring app that is accurately calibrated based on those specs. Androids don't share a common manufacturer, so NIOSH has not yet been able to build an accurate noise monitoring app for Android. If you don't have access to an iPhone (yours or a friend's), you can borrow one from one of the FPDCC nature centers.2
*Cook, Lake, Will, DuPage, McHenry, and Kane counties. I guess you don't have to live there per se but you'll probably want to have regular access to places in those bounds. Though if not, I suppose you could email Negin, the lead on the project, and ask if you can provide useful data from other parts of the Brood XIII region! She's very friendly. -
No markdown in post titles means my footnotes go out of order and look weird, sorry!