New Map Shows USA's Quietest Places 99
sciencehabit writes Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day. After feeding acoustic data into a computer algorithm, the researchers modeled sound levels across the country including variables such as air and street traffic. Deep blue regions, such as Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, have background noise levels lower than 20 decibels — a silence likely as deep as before European colonization, researchers say. That's orders of magnitude quieter than most cities, where noise levels average 50-60 decibels. The National Park Service is using the map to identify places where human-made noise is affecting wildlife.
Just the kind of places (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, dial-up or satellte services though. ;)
Re:Just the kind of places (Score:5, Interesting)
1970s TV movie of the week (Score:3)
Sounds like a plot to a classic 70s TV movie or an episode of one of those anthology shows. Got to have the protagonist cupping his ears, with a look of severe distress as non-stop quick shots of things making innocuous noises flash, interjected by the camera wildly pan-zooming his face.
Needs more cowbell.
Re:Just the kind of places (Score:5, Informative)
Well given I live in the woods I will tell you that they are not quiet!
Come sundown the cicadas go mental and their noise can make talking to someone else hard. Then there are all the birds! Do you know how loud a cockatoo is!!! Let alone a kookaburra! Then at night you get the demonic noises of fighting possums, the sounds of male koalas and all the frogs. Damn you frogs!
And then if you really really really want to hear a noise that will chill you to your bones - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] - that is the sound of the Curlew. When you hear that for the first time in the middle of the night........
It might be a different noise to cars, or sirens, or some morons crap music. But woods, quiet they are not!
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As an Australian who currently lives in the US, I can tell you that North American forests are way, way quieter than Australian ones. Birds particularly are very quiet here by comparison. I really miss magpies warbling and whipbirds and yes even the occasional cockatoo screech :)
Not only that but in Australia forests are noisy year-round. Here we are in deepest winter half the year (down to -30 C or lower) and there's not much animal activity happening in those months.
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Fair enough. I have only been to the cities in the US so haven't experienced their forests first hand.
I am lucky enough to have a pair of nesting black cockatoos in my property. They are about 100m from the house but if the windows are open in the morning they will wake me every time. I also have a creek that runs through as well so I get a huge number of frogs and cicadas. Yesterday at sundown my phone said 80db with its dodgy inaccurate sound meter.
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Don't be so sure. .. It's great until you adjust. Then, little sounds that you'd never notice before start becoming a real problem. The thud of a closing car door a few hundred feet away, or the sounds of a second hand on an old fashioned clock, or any number of other things really can become distracting
I wouldn't agree. I live somewhere relatively quiet, by a secondary road 10 miles from the nearest town, and I much prefer the quiet to the city where I was before.
Basically, how disturbing sounds are depends how far they can be interpreted as a "threat". On a plain road, like where I live now, the low sound of a passing car can sound soothing - as long as it passes. However, there is a rough bit of ground by the road about 50 yards from me and occasionally a car stops in it, probably to use their mob
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We were fools, fools to desire such silence! Silence was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this... quiet. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the... whispers... began.
Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly... we began to UNDERSTAND.
No, no, please! I don't want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out... oh, god, the scr
Wilderness State Park (Score:5, Interesting)
The quietest place I've ever been is Wilderness State Park in Michigan in the fall. No wildlife, an extremely quiet white noise coming from the lake - it was strange. Bryce Canyon was pretty quiet, too, but Wilderness is strikingly quiet. It's also a "dark sky park" so the stars at night are phenomenal.
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Re:Wilderness State Park (Score:4, Funny)
Not once but twice I've had a skunk face to face with me in my tent. You'd think I'd learn something from that, but no. ;)
It isn't when the face is aimed at you that you need to worry.
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I swear on my life, I have the exact same story (Dave or John, is that you?!?!)
Back country camping the Tetons (this was summer 1990 I think), we took care to hoist anything with smell 100ft away, up in the trees... all of a sudden in the middle of the night, we hear an animal, which sounded very large, moving around our camp. Snorfling, walking, breathing, exploring.... it was probably only 5 minutes, but I swear, it felt like an hour. I have never, ever been more motionless in my life. 2 of us think
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Wilderness is of course quiet. If you're prey, you're quiet 'cause if you're noisy you get eaten. If you're predator, you're quiet because if your prey hears you you won't eat.
Wild orgies... (Score:3)
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Wilderness is of course quiet. If you're prey, you're quiet 'cause if you're noisy you get eaten. If you're predator, you're quiet because if your prey hears you you won't eat.
I live next to a undeveloped property and it's almost as noisy as the neighbors. Wind blows through the trees, limbs crack and fall off with a crash. All sorts of birds making a racket, frogs and gators - who can be one loud predator during mating season.
A wilderness where there's no animals and no wind may be quiet, but nowhere near here.
Re:Wilderness State Park (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wilderness State Park (Score:4, Interesting)
If an area is declared a national park you can have your house resumed by the government. In the same way as if they were building a road. A mate of mine owned a house on Phillip Island and had it resumed because his house was right in the middle of the reserve they created for the fairy penguins. It was sad at the time because it was one of the most amazing spots on earth but we understood. We never drove to the house after dark, we always walked the last 3 kms because the penguins were all over the road and there was nothing you could have done to avoid smooshing them.
The saddest part was when they demolished it.
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Try Binna Burra in the Gold Coast Hinterland. You can camp there, or stay in cabins and you get a mixture of temperate rainforest animals and temperate eucalyptus. The mix gives two sets of wildlife for your morning chorus. You also get in the morning the paddymelons out in force.
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The Sand Dunes park is also one of the places least affected by light pollution, beautiful viewing. Unfortunately the presence of 24 hour lighting in nearby ranching operations is increasing.
I'm so blue... (Score:4, Interesting)
Where we are is pretty deep blue on the map but I bet it is even bluer in reality as we are in a valley surrounded by mountains that lift the sound up over us providing an extra buffer. Loving it in the deep blue.
Interesting to note the map also looks like the city lights maps.
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Interesting to note the map also looks like the city lights maps.
No surprise at all there that the maps would look so similar.
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Duh. Where there is human, there is light, noise and I dare say a pollution map wouldn't be that much different.
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Just because there are humans does not mean there will be light, noise or pollution.
There is where I go camping... I carry a flashlight and a propane lantern. I also snore something awful.
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No, actually most of what is in my house was created by me and has never been to a city and mostly those things were created from materials right here on our own land. I have few possessions.
It's a very different world than you are used to, clearly.
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You won't find any light from us. I am careful to not waste light.
So what do you do? Cover your house inside with mirrors?
Re:I'm so blue... (Score:5, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/1138/ [xkcd.com]
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nteresting to note the map also looks like the city lights maps.
Interesting that they both show a sharp verticle divide right down the center of the country. When I first saw it on the light pollution maps it was so sharp that I wondered whether it was a time-of-photo artifact.
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Yeah, after thinking about it for a while I did exactly that. Came back to post about it, and found your post.
One map showed the 100th meridian as the divide between who gets 20"/year and who doesn't.
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If said light map wannabe *interactively* overlays iPhone to Android to Blackberry adoption in your own neighborhood, you can still learn a thing or two:
https://www.mapbox.com/labs/tw... [mapbox.com]
Correlating iPhone and blackberry adoptions to high vs low class income areas to your expectations / preconeptions of your "poor" neighborhood and seeing if the map matches them is neat.
Looking at rent price differences graphically if you don't even live in Manhattan also provides some education and amusement http://www.hous [housingmaps.com]
From an Audio Engineer (Score:5, Interesting)
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Get yourself a pair of Bose QC25.
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Yeah, and good earplugs like these [etymotic.com] have a nearly flat frequency response which make it easier to have a conversation in loud room, unlike foam earplugs or headphones that muffle the sound in addition to attenuating it.
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$12 is cheap for something that lasts years (with occasional use) and prevents you from going deaf at rock concerts, while still allowing you to hear the music like it was supposed to sound, instead of sounding like you are underwater. These are not audiophile pseudoscience garbage, the frequency response of the earplugs is scientifically quantifiable, and the difference in sound quality is immediately obvious to anyone who tries them, not just idiots with "golden ears" who can hear differences that don't e
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My ears are so good that I can tell if the bits of a music file are coming from magnetic drive, optical disc or flash storage.
Re:From an Audio Engineer (Score:5, Insightful)
Get yourself a pair of Bose QC25.
Did you just tell an audio engineer to buy Bose products? Why don't you kick his dog and call his mother a whore while you're at it.
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Oh for the modpoints :-)
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He was talking about getting some peace and quiet, not about getting the best audio you can buy.
AFAIK, the best commercially available noise-canceling headphones are the QC25.
Re:From an Audio Engineer (Score:5, Interesting)
If recording studios aren't quieter than nature, then it seems like perhaps they haven't been built correctly. I've been in recording studios before at work, and the lack of any ambient sound in the booths is almost disturbing in their deep, dead silence. Granted, it sounds like you have more sensitive ears than most, though, so perhaps you can pick up on stuff I couldn't.
Nature actually has quite a bit of low-level ambient noise from the wind blowing though plants and trees, flowing water or surf, not to mention insects, and various animals that sing, cry, chirp, and howl on occasion. There's a reason modern films often can't use sound directly captured from shoots on location. However, I can perhaps understand what you mean, in that these noises seem to be much more soothing than cityscapes or other man-made sounds. It always seems easier for my brain to filter these noises out than a loud ticking of a clock, the hum and rattling of an air conditioner, or vehicles driving on a nearby freeway.
You should try to visit an anechoic chamber sometime. The near absolute silence drives some people nuts, but I'll bet you'd love it! I've heard that after a time, you can actually even your own heart and the sound of blood pumping through your body, since there's nothing else to cover up such faint sounds.
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Re:From an Audio Engineer (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess your experience in the anechoic chamber was similar to most people then. I'd like to try it myself someday, but based on my time in very quiet studios, I'm sure I'd find it as uncomfortable as anyone else.
As far as the difference with outdoor environments, nature often tends to have a lot of diffuse and absorptive surfaces compared to our very unnatural flat and reflective indoor surfaces. Flat-sided, boxy rooms tend to create a lot of harsh and unnatural sounding echo and reverberation unless special precautions are taken like you see in high quality recording studios or music halls.
You can immediately tell from the difference in ambient reflections when you step from an indoor to an outdoor environment - first, because half of the sound waves never come back (going skyward), and from those that do bounce back, they're all nicely diffused from a wide variety of irregular surfaces, unlike what we typically have indoors. I'd guess that may help to create the pleasant aural experience we have outside in nature, where even if it's not perfectly quiet, the background diffused pleasantly into patterns of easily ignorable pink or brown noise.
I pay attention to stuff like this because I'm a videogame programmer that has previously specialized in audio programming. Part of the work I did was with DSP algorithms that would help differentiate between those two environments without necessarily baking those effects into the source material, generating artificial reverberation and echo effects on demand. The videogame industry has long had standardized hardware with some of these systems built in (EAX & I3DL2) , but the more recent trends are doing this all in software, which actually gives us some more flexibility in tweaking how they work. So, I spent a lot of time looking at the relationship between environmental structures and materials, and how that contributed to the overall aural scene using these DSP algorithms. It was pretty interesting and challenging work.
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Anechoic chambers are interesting places. The engineering department at the university had one and just walking down the hall next to it was creepy. It was almost like a huge vacuum that sucked up the sounds in the hall if the door was open. I would have loved to spend a few min in there, but I get the feeling it would not have been a pleasant experience for me.
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> anechoic chamber ... The near absolute silence drives some people nuts,
Those things definitely are "weird" -- in a good way :-)
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I mean way out there where you will find very few people nearby. It is difficult to find words to describe how nice and peaceful it is when it's so quiet - not to hear noise of any kind, except from nature.
I know. I chose to live in such a place ;-)
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My job will sort you out. Engineer at an industrial plant. They just fired up a 30MW air compressor and are using it to blow crud out of very large pipework. I'm sitting at my desk in an office with earmuffs on and the noise is still unbearable.
To save all of you time... (Score:5, Informative)
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Exactly my thoughts.
A better map might show noise vs population density.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2, Insightful)
http://xkcd.com/1138/
Just another heat map of the population. Nothing to see here, folks.
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Orders of Magnitude (Score:4, Informative)
Decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale. 30 dB is an order of magnitude louder than 20 dB (10 times the power).
Re:Orders of Magnitude (Score:5, Insightful)
60db is only 1/3 of an order of magnitude above 20db. 200db is one order of magnitude above 20db and is like a canon going off and no city is that loud consistently. Two orders of magnitude above 20db would damage hearing at 2,000db.
You fail. db is a logarithmic scale. 10db is a factor of 10. 60db is 4 orders of magnitude from 20db.
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It's a log scale.. +3db is double the magnitude. So 20 to 60 is +40db which is about 13 doublings (40/3=39), or 8,192 times the original magnitude plus another 1/3 of a double which puts you almost exactly at 11,000 times the magnitude.
Engineers use db so you don't have to do all the multiplication and division to compare the numbers, you can just add and subtract. It harkens back to the days of slide rules where taking the log of a number was *easy* and then you could just add or subtract to multiply an
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You took a rather roundabout route to a somewhat inaccurate value of what 40dB meant.
The definition is that +10dB is 10 times the power. So +40dB is by definition 10000 times the power. 3dB is only approximately a doubling.
But that doesn't explain the figure you gave. A "third of a doubling" would mean multiplying by the cube root of 2 which would give an answer of about 10321, still somewhat off from the correct answer but substantially closer than the figure you gave.
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Yea.... My brain was messed up... After remembering that Decibels means 1/10th of a bel by definition, this means that +40DB is 10,000 (four zeros) by definition... This 3db is double thing is a short hand rule that is "close enough" for slide rule math and what I originally was taught to use when doing calculations like this.
So... given the problem with the rule of thumb approximation I used, I'm not going to try and defend the math that got me the wrong answer..
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well what do you know ....
that map looks exactly like a map of CITY LIGHTS
What about Alaska? (Score:1)
Why isn't Alaska represented?
The map is a fraud (Score:2)
As other commenters have noticed, the map looks like a light map, a little TOO much like a light map.
At first I thought they actually HAD used a light map, just for the sake of illustration, but it clearly shows a legend in decibels.
Here is a light map from NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/defa... [nasa.gov]
You will notice a few small but very bright dots in North Dakota. These are not cities, they are oil fields. They aren't nearly as loud as a city of comparable light output, yet they still show up as bright spots on
Mr. Obvious . . . (Score:2)
Your map is ready.
Obvious (Score:2)
It's only that silent, because there's nobody there to hear the falling trees and shitting bears.
Orange (Score:1)
Death Valley (Score:2)
Death Valley has: no flaura*, no fauna*, one road*.
*Yes, obviously, there are brine shrimp and microscopic organisms and the odd car. That being said, no trees, grasses are there to rustle in the rare winds 282 ft below sea level.
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You haven't been to Antarctica?
"The Simpsons are going to Antarctica!"
P.S. Of course it could be a different continent bu that is most likely.