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New Map Shows USA's Quietest Places

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-little-peace-and-quiet dept.

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.

25 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Just the kind of places by invictusvoyd · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'd like to spend my entire life in ... BTW does it have an internet connection?

    1. Re:Just the kind of places by digsbo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Just the kind of places by Harlequin80 · · 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?... - 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!

  2. Wilderness State Park by JBMcB · · 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.

    --
    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
    1. Re:Wilderness State Park by irrational_design · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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 ;-)

    2. Re:Wilderness State Park by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Informative

      In 1980 I moved from inner suburban Melbourne to a sawmill town which is now a ghost town in the middle of a huge national park that straddles the NSW/VIC border. The town had about a dozen houses, a sawmill and a dairy farm, there were no other humans for at least 50km in every direction. The first few nights I found it difficult to sleep, bellowing cows, a chorus of frogs, barking of wild dogs, squealing of feral pigs, owls hooting, etc, all combined to make a huge racket all night long. Midday was the quietest, the mill was silent due to lunch and the birds were quiet because of the midday heat. The sheer volume of the morning chorus of birds while walking to work is something I will never forget. Since the 80's I've spent a lot of time in the bush, camping with my kids, etc. Never have I come across another place with such prolific (and loud) wildlife. I feel privileged to have lived and worked in such a place and even though it meant losing my house and job at the time, I'm glad it is now a national park.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    3. Re:Wilderness State Park by Harlequin80 · · Score: 3, 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.

    4. Re:Wilderness State Park by RabidReindeer · · Score: 3, 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.

  3. I'm so blue... by pubwvj · · Score: 3, 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.

    1. Re:I'm so blue... by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      Duh. Where there is human, there is light, noise and I dare say a pollution map wouldn't be that much different.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:I'm so blue... by ckatko · · Score: 2

      Except that air pollution can travel with the wind, and can affect communities that aren't producing the problem at all.

    3. Re:I'm so blue... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    4. Re:I'm so blue... by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 4, Funny

      http://xkcd.com/1138/

  4. From an Audio Engineer by djbckr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:From an Audio Engineer by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    2. Re:From an Audio Engineer by Iniamyen · · Score: 2

      Noise cancelling headphones are highly frequency-dependent, and typically attenuate only 20 dB or so. Earplugs can attenuate 30 dB, and aren't as frequency-dependent. And they are dirt cheap. The only downside is that they don't play music.

    3. Re:From an Audio Engineer by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    4. Re:From an Audio Engineer by acoustix · · 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.

      --
      "A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
  5. To save all of you time... by djbckr · · Score: 4, Informative

    The summary is pretty much the entire contents of the linked article, except for a relatively low-resolution map of the US with colors indicating what's loud and quiet. You guessed it - cities are loud, wilderness is quiet.

  6. Obligatory XKCD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    http://xkcd.com/1138/

    Just another heat map of the population. Nothing to see here, folks.

    1. Re:Obligatory XKCD by dsginter · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      More
  7. Re:Orders of Magnitude by jeaton · · Score: 3, Informative

    Decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale. 30 dB is an order of magnitude louder than 20 dB (10 times the power).

  8. Re:Orders of Magnitude by sribe · · Score: 4, 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.

  9. Wild orgies... by TapeCutter · · Score: 2

    Yes, but there's often a hell of a racket shortly after predator spots prey. And then there's sex, when one frog is croaking for a mate a fox can easily home in on it, when tens of thousands are doing it all at the same time even the fox's huge ears cannot pinpoint an individual frog unless it's almost standing on it. Disorientating predators with omni-directional noise is a common tactic for a variety of small critters. In certain years large green cicadas here in Oz fill the trees for a few weeks in summer, the high pitched noise can be that loud that it hurts your ears. There are millions of them each about the size of a man's thumb, making a huge racket, but spotting one in a tree takes a surprising amount of searching and luck.

    Nature's noisy orgies are short and seasonal, for the rest of the year(s) between events the same location will be almost silent.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  10. 1970s TV movie of the week by BenJeremy · · Score: 2

    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.