New Map Shows USA's Quietest Places

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.

Comments

Wilderness State Park

[JBMcB]

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.

Re:Wilderness State Park

[irrational_design]

The quietest place I've ever been is back-country camping in Teton National Park. That is until one night when a large animal came sniffing around our tent. To this day I still don't know what it was, but it sounded large and suitably freaked us out ;-)

Re:Wilderness State Park

[Harlequin80]

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.

I'm so blue...

[pubwvj]

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.

From an Audio Engineer

[djbckr]

I'm a part-time musician and audio engineer. Because of this, I have a more sensitive perception of noise than probably most people. I have lived in urban/suburban areas most of my adult life and I can hardly stand it. Even quiet recording studios don't really get it as quiet as I'd like. I try to get out to the wilderness whenever I can which is every couple of months - 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. We are surrounded by air-conditioning and cars, and people and civilization - and it frankly takes a toll on my sanity (the sound is all I'm talking about). Much to my wife's chagrin, I regularly wear earplugs to restaurants, and always carry them with me. It's really amazing how loud things are.

Re:From an Audio Engineer

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:From an Audio Engineer

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[dsginter]

Actually, no - this isn't just another heat map of the population. Take the Midwest, for example: there's some pretty rural areas there but, because they are flat, two factors dominate: sound is free to travel and wind is a huge contributing factor. I'm from Michigan and spent my summers on a large farm. When the wind wasn't present, you could hear things from miles away. However, in a truly quiet area (a tranquil valley is the only place that I've ever encountered this), it becomes immediately apparent when wind and man-made noise vanishes. I've been fortunate enough to experience this and it is difficult to describe (scary, awesome, surreal, etc). That said, I'm noticing that this is a "macro" map. There are plenty of quiet places hidden in that mix. They need to add a zoom feature to that map. But, if they did, they'd need to update it in only a matter of weeks or months. Silence is truly magical.

Re:Just the kind of places

[digsbo]

Don't be so sure. It seems great at first, but one of the things you might not anticipate is the revenge effect of a low noise noise floor. I moved from a horribly noisy situation to a much quieter one. 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, even to the point of causing anxiety. Unless you're basically in the woods, in which case the sounds of your own house can become like a raging cacophony. White noise becomes a refuge. You wait for the rain.