Driverless Cars As Noise Pollution Spotters, Mobile Ears On The Go

Dr. Lance B. Eliot, AI Insider

Noise pollution is serious stuff and the EPA is concerned

I was being serenaded. Standing on the street corner at New York Times Square, I was surrounded by the epic and at times overwhelming sounds of New York City (NYC). I had come to the city that never sleeps to speak at an industry conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Opting to walk from my hotel to the conference location, I couldn’t help but hear the nefarious noises of this hustling and bustling famous town.

NYC has a lot of claim to fame, and one of those claims is that it is the noisiest city in all of North America (not just limited to the United States!).

Environmentalists would label it as noise pollution.

Sound is energy. Typically measured in Sound Pressure Levels (SPLs), those city noises are battering your ears. Often, it is customary to use dBA’s (formerly described as A-weighted decibels) as a scale for comparing different kinds of noises. The SPL dBA is a logarithmic scale and you need to carefully interpret the numbers used, realizing that as the numbers increase it is not simply a linear progression.

Let’s consider some sounds that pertain to human hearing. The sound of a pin dropping is 10 dBA. You have pretty good ears to ear that sound. Rustling leaves are typically around 20…