A reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream created with Lego tiles and part of The Art of Brick exhibition displayed in Boston last December (Credit: Giovana Girardi/Personal files)

It took me the noise caused by a World Snow Mobile Expo in West Yellowstone, Montana, to remember how annoying can be to live in a high decibel environment. That, however, was not the first time it happened: the construction of a building a few meters from where I lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a clumsy local regulation on trucks deliveries took away countless hours of sleep for three years. Both experiences inspired me with the idea of creating a participatory app to measure urban noise.  In the absence of a better name, it would be called Silêncio! (Silence!)

Altough there is not official data available – the City Hall vetoed last year a proposal to develop a noise map -, common sense indicates Sao Paulo is a noisy city. Sources of disturbance are diverse, from construction sites – a city law from 2009 allows trucks to enter the central region only at night -, bars and restaurants to evengelic churches. There are laws regulating noise levels during day and night, but, as expected in many cases in Brazil, the public servers in charge of applying them are reduced – they are part of the Urban Silence Program, or Psiu (Shoosh! in English). According to the last balance published by the City Hall, complaints about urban silence were among the main 3 reasons citizens looked for public assistance in the last trimester of 2014.

Besides the lack of personel to respond to all complaints, the bureaucracy is another issue. The Psiu agent has to go to every source of noise and measure it from the house of the person who called. This creates a “cat and mouse” game, as the construction/bar/church notices the arrival of the public power and reduce the decibels. Some neighborhood associations, as the SOSsego Vila Madalena, tried to create maps of noisy bars in the region to pressure the City Hall, but they provide no concrete evidence besides the complaints themselves.

That is precisely where my proposal could be helpful. If the neighbors of every noise source knew the decibels regulations and how to measure them formally, as Psiu agents would do (the same distance, for instance), they wouldn’t depend on public service only to spot problems. All the measurements would be fed in a database that, in its turn, would be applied to a map, showing the number of people aware of it – the more, the smaller the chance of a biased complaint – and how the sound spreads in each microregion. The map would be a very useful instrument for public agents to orient their service, as it would bring day and hour, in average, where the biggest noise happens.

The precise mapping of noise levels, according to ProAcustica, an association created to debate the problem in Brazil, is also vital for debating issues as new zoning laws and the construction of public transport stations or airports.

The measuring system may be considered a bottleneck to the idea, but according to a research published last year (http://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2014/04/09/sound-apps/), some smartphones may be close enough of a precision level that, if not works as the “smoking gun” in each case, at least can be used to alert that an official action is needed on a specific place.

Resume

The pros: 

– Silence! is directly operated by citizens with a smartphone, stimulating direct participation and awareness about the urban noise debat

– Requires reasonably reduced management and can be paired with Google Maps and GPS to provide precise locatio

– Simple to operate, altough it relies on apps

The problems:

– The need of a smartphone may be a problem in poorer neighborhoods in Brazil

– Depends on paid apps that are more precise than free ones

– Ethical issue: must be based on an anonimity system to avoid stressing even more the neighbor – noise source relation or would that stimulate biased complaints at first?