I started this project with this simple question:
Where are silent places?
The moment you arrive in a city you've never been before, tons of information about how and where to find the places you should be (to spend your money), are fighting for your attention. Probably it will never be any real problem to find the next best food opportunity or hardware store for example, or maybe even cultural places like museum or different kinds of venues. But where, and there is my question again, where are the silent places? I'm not talking about parks or green spaces in general, because most of the time they're full of people making noise, just as on the streets and public places. Don´t get me wrong, I like being outside, I like people. Sometimes I only would like to know, where you can go to find some peace and rest without too much distraction.
I live in Erfurt now, for about one year, and if I would know these silent places I probably wouldn't have to ask about. I only would mark their locations on the map, and i would be done here. But because of this lack of knowledge I decided to change the initial question, or better to answer it in a different way.
The answer?
If I could get to know the average volume of several places in this town, I would simultaneously isolate the low level areas. Following this thought, I picked some example positions, where I recorded one minute of the noise in the morning, the early afternoon an evening over 3 days. So I got 9 audio files for every position, from which I calculated the average. Unfortunately I don't have a standardized measurement microphone, so I had to assign the results to numbers on a relative scale from 1 to 9, where 1 equals about -68dB and 9 about -20dB, according to the sensitivity of my mic (Zoom H4).
As a point of reference I took some recordings in the garden of my parent's house, which is situated in a village with only 200 inhabitants. As expected, with -58,3dB it's real quiet there, compared to Erfurt. It's a solid 2 on my relative scale.
The other places I chose, and their noise levels are:
Klein Venedig (small park region)
- -53,39dB : scaled 3
Krämerbrücke (historical bridge)
- -50,40dB : scaled 4
Schlüterstraße 3a (in front of my flat)
- -48,81dB : scaled 4
Fischmarkt (smaller public place)
- -48,52dB : scaled 4
Domplatz (large cathedral square)
- -43,97dB : scaled 5
Anger (the central public place)
- -42,19dB : scaled 5
Stauffenbergallee (main road)
- -37,09dB : scaled 6
Juri-Gagarin-Ring (main road)
- -35,64dB : scaled 6
Talknoten (crossing of the two)
- -33,58dB : scaled 7
I added the gained information to the openstreetmap with the tag „noise“ and the relative volume level. Sure it will be deleted soon for inaccuracy, but however, I think the idea isn't that bad.
These places are only examples or a kind of starting point for further studies. If one would continue to examine volumes like that (better with standardized equipment), a noise map could be made up, giving a growing overview about our sound environment and of course, the silent places.