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hunter2_today at 5:27 PM0 repliesview on HN

We would need to figure out a quantifiable metric for annoyance level. Municipal sound ordinances do tend to correctly utilize SPL(A) and SPL(C), with A-weighting being relevant for safety against ear injury (low frequencies have less influence) and C-weighting being relevant for annoyance level (low frequencies have more influence), but this isn't nearly enough. For example, ordinances carve out additional tolerance for burstiness, which makes sense for rare events like jackhammering but not for common events like routine plant operations. Sound with lots of harmonic content (think distortion) is more annoying than without. High frequencies can be worse if they reach you, but they're less likely to reach you (approaching a need for line-of-sight). It's complicated.

Here's a free idea for someone to run with: just as Zillow has a neighborhood "walkability" score prospective buyers might look at, there could be various pollution scores, including sound and light, sourced from some kind of Flock-like (ew) network of capture devices. Some folks are into mounting things like personal weather stations on their property, so maybe a new generation of devices capturing this type of data (with local signature-based identification of sources, and triangulation when the same thing is heard in multiple places, etc.) wouldn't be too far-fetched.