Noise Visualization in the Tenderloin by Movity (YC W10) | Hacker News Reader

Noise Visualization in the Tenderloin by Movity (YC W10)

tendernoise.movity.com

88 pointsericwu0130 comments

We built out a quick visualization of the noise data we've been collecting in the city. Again, the link is here: http://tendernoise.movity.com.

Our goal for this noise project is to show the affect of noise (from muni, cable cars, bars, people) on the quality of life. We're going to collect and scale the data to other neighborhoods shortly.

It's v.1, so let us know what you think.

That's pretty nice. Looking forward to seeing more from this.

I used to live in the TL, your graph suggests there are no police sirens around 12am - 4am, I find that hard to believe. =)

Maybe you could add sound samples? Would make the whole experience a bit more personal...

Interesting - is "average" noise level defined as a 5-minute Leq?

I'm curious to see how you expand this to other metro areas. Arup has deep pockets but I suspect not deep enough to cover even most metro areas in the USA, and (unlike the EU) we Americans aren't really big on noise-mapping our cities.

What do the lengths of the coloured bars in the bottom panel represent?

Edit: Oh and I forgot to say this is awesome. How did you make this?

The range between the highest and lowest db reading at that given moment. The measurements were taking by us, analyzed by Arup (Arup.com), and visualized by Sha Hwang. He literally built it in 2 days and one of the few folks who specialize in data visualization.

Very cool. Are you considering releasing the data? It would be interesting to see the same data explored and visualised in other ways.

Cool. I did a traffic visualization from my apartment on Haight Street on New Years Eve and the first week of January this year. I just had a webcam with some software to detect movement in the middle of the intersection.

http://tlrobinson.net/projects/haightcam/traffic.png

(My R skills aren't great, sorry it's not pretty. The camera also got blocked for awhile around day 5 so it's not exactly scientific)

That first cycle starts mid day on New Years Eve. You can see a big drop in traffic leading up to midnight, then a big increase soon after. Not surprising, but it's always a little gratifying to confirm a hypothesis.

Neat! Do you have the data posted anywhere? I'm not sure my code produces much of an improvement on yours, but you can get some nice results with ggplot2:

library(ggplot2) x <- Sys.time() + 60 * (1:2400) y <- rpois(2400, 50 * (sin(seq(-4 * pi, 4 * pi, len=2400)) + 1.1)) qplot(as.POSIXct(x), y, geom=c("point", "smooth"), xlab="time", ylab="count")

That's neat. I used to live in Ann Arbor, which is a quiet student town that gets very crowded on football weekends. It would be interesting to make up a game that makes users match unlabeled traffic graphs to the towns or neighborhoods where the graphs were generated.

Perhaps you could find people that are willing to install these sensors outside their windows. You could run them from a power adapter to get more than 3 days worth of data collection + less hassle from cops. If you are moving this project into the Tendernob and need a place to put equipment on Pine St, I'd be happy to help out.

Great idea Alex. Crowdsourcing the data collection might be a great route... we'd have to account for calibration and consistency of devices, but I think that could all be overcome.

This is really cool! Having lived in the Tenderloin, I can testify to the impact of its noise on my quality of life.

How is the project being funded? What does it take to install the data capturing equipment? How do the interactions with the city or property owners go?

We try to be inconspicuous when installing our noise capturing equipment. We're frequently questioned by cops but usually they're just curious after they establish we're not stealing traffic lights. One time, some bums asked us what we were doing, and after we told them we were collecting noise data, they started screaming into our noise recorders :(

"Booby traps for tourists. If we catch one you can have the money, but leave the body for us."

The data is collected with decibel recorders in each intersection. We wanted as many data points as possible so the devices could only last 3.5 days.

We were stopped by two sets of police, business owners, and local residences. But we explained that our goal was to educate new residents the impact of noise and most were excited about the project. We're looking into giving the SF gov't access to the data to work on improvements.

I can only imagine if you tried this in Boston ;)

Shouldn't be a problem. The Big Dig did extensive noise monitoring for almost 10 years and maybe had a couple of monitors messed with.

I think he meant this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare

I'm wondering if there's a way to crowdsource this with cellphones. I realize it's a little out there, but there are thousands and thousands of microphones already blanketing every urban area ...

edit: Google informs me of http://www.noisetube.net/

Just a couple days ago, I was thinking it'd be cool to have a "noise" layer on Google Maps, but I figured it would be too hard to get good resolution over a large area.

We're working on modeling out the data we're collecting to be able to do a noise layer for the entire city (weekend vs. weekday and the time of day as a slider). We're hoping to have a demo up and running in a few weeks.

I would suggest that the data is more useful when combined with information on the negative effects of noisy environments. For instance see http://www.designshare.com/research/lmaxwell/noisechildren.h... for some information on impacts of noisy environments on children's ability to learn.

wow , just today I was thinking about similar idea. Crowd sourcing air pollution. Adding some small device to your smartphone(andruino with android) that sniffs the air and analyzes the pollutants ,etc. Then sends it back to the server and can visualize it. About a thousand users in a big city would be enough . Not only just to see it on the web, but for example city traffic lights can divert cars depending on the polluted area,deciding where to buy/rent a house

Very cool project. It seems like getting every other intersection might be overkill? I'd be more interested in something sparser that covers more of the city.

Tenderloin?

Tenderloin is a SF neighborhood

It's a neighborhood in San Francisco - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco .

Could this data be gathered by google's streetview cars? :)

I'd be curious to see how many cameras are left on those cars after leaving them overnight in the Tenderloin.

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