Loudness

Creation(s)

Loudness meter - a quick sketch, conceptual/functional UI, no design work

This was fun because it was a quick sketch that let me play with Scratch sensing, and more importantly flushed out the requirements and gave the idea some shape. Also, I got to learn something about how we perceive sound from an expert in human perception.*

The inquiry:

I want to start an app when I enter the restaurant and sample the noise level every x minutes and when i leave, send the samplings to a database for ultimate 1-10 noise rating service provision

seeking restaurants that have both good food and that are quiet – so we can hold a conversation, especially when there is a group of 4, 6, or 8.

how about a simple way that people can measure sound level, add their opinions, and submit it

The result:

A good deal of work on getting an accurate sound level would be necessary:

developing a good sound-level meter is not as simple as measuring microphone output…dB is a measure of sound energy. There are multiple dB scales, such as dB A which is weighted to correspond to the normal frequency response of a person (which is not the same as someone’s frequency response when they have impaired hearing…[someone may] not hear anything above 4 KHz, while the dBa goes all th way to 20KHZ

So it was helpful that I had not written a react native phone app to explore the idea, which would have taken me much longer, and I got to learn something about human perception from someone who’s studied it for years.

* That expert being Don Norman.