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

Just the kind of places

[invictusvoyd]

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

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.

Re:Just the kind of places

[Harlequin80]

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!

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:From an Audio Engineer

[acoustix]

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.