Italy and the United States top the list with the highest average noise exposure in the world. Italians are most bothered by the din of the 'Autostrada', with 39% exposed to a high or medium-high level of traffic noise, including car horns and heavy vehicles.
The report revealed that the South Asian region which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal is the noisiest in the world with Latin America and Europe as the quietest regions.
Kolkata, India
This honk-happy city, according to The Telegraph, Calcutta, has honked its way to the top of the decibel charts.
It ranks Dhaka of Bangladesh as the loudest city in the world with a noise level of 119 dB, followed by Moradabad in India with 114dB and Islamabad in Pakistan with 105dB.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis is the quietest place in the world, with a background noise reading of –9.4 decibels. If you chatted with someone, your speech would measure around 60 decibels on a sound-level meter.
The loudest sound in recorded history came from the volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island Krakatoa at 10.02 a.m. on August 27, 1883. The explosion caused two thirds of the island to collapse and formed tsunami waves as high as 46 m (151 ft) rocking ships as far away as South Africa.
It has 36 massive loudspeaker horns (properly called "noise sources") covering one entire wall. These speakers, driven by pressurised nitrogen gas, can saturate the room with 163 dB of continuous noise for up to 10 minutes.
Common Sources of Noise and Decibel Levels
Noise above 70 dB over a prolonged period of time may start to damage your hearing. Loud noise above 120 dB can cause immediate harm to your ears.
The lowest hearing decibel level is 0 dB, which indicates nearly total silence and is the softest sound that the human ear can hear. Generally speaking, the louder the sound, the higher the decibel number.
But the loudest is the sperm whale. It makes a series of clicking noises that can reach as high as 230 db making it the loudest animal in the world. The click lasts for only 15 to 30 milliseconds and can stay audible to a sperm whale as much as 10 miles away.
Light does not really affect sound. Sound is made of vibrations (aka rapid pressure fluctuations) in air, water, or solid material.
Hailey et al.) For the first time in history, earthlings can hear what a black hole sounds like: a low-pitched groaning, as if a very creaky heavy door was being opened again and again.
Sperm whales carry the largest and one of the most complicated biological sound generators in the animal kingdom. Their sound generating nose can reach a weight of more than 10 tonnes and generate the highest sound pressures ever measured from any animal with back calculated source sound pressure levels of 230 dB re.
The brain creates noise to fill the silence, and we hear this as tinnitus. Perhaps only someone with profound deafness can achieve this level of silence, so paradoxically loud.
For example, people generally only feel comfortable with a noise level of 30 – 40dB in a bedroom but will happily work in an open plan office with a noise level of 45 – 50dB. You would expect a background noise in a library to be around 30dB.
Yes, that's minus 9.4 decibels! The labrotory's founder, Steven Orfield, said, “”We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark – one person stayed in there for 45 minutes. When it's quiet, ears will adapt.
While some have hypothesised that 'death by black hole' would involve a painful roasting, generally, physicists agree that if you get too close to the event horizon, your body would be 'spagettified' as the gravitational tidal forces stretched you apart.
Black holes, the insatiable monsters of the universe, are impossible to kill with any of the weapons in our grasp. The only thing that can hasten a black hole's demise is a cable made of cosmic strings, a hypothetical material predicted by string theory.
The fate of anyone falling into a black hole would be a painful “spaghettification,” an idea popularized by Stephen Hawking in his book “A Brief History of Time.” In spaghettification, the intense gravity of the black hole would pull you apart, separating your bones, muscles, sinews and even molecules.
What Color Noise Is Best For Anxiety? White noise can be one of the best colors to help with anxiety, especially if you have trouble sleeping at night. The steady drone of white noise is wonderful for insomnia. You may also want to try pink noise for the same ailments.
Studies have shown that pink noise helps reduce brain waves and increase stable sleep. Plus, pink noise helps you spend more time in deep, slow wave sleepwhich improves memory recall. You'll also wake up more refreshed because you spend more time in deep sleep.
For some people with ADHD, neuron signals in the brain are like fireworks exploding in all directions, Söderlund said. The result can be a “noisy” head with chaotic thoughts competing for attention. White or brown noise appears to help the brain harness the neurons, focus attention and quiet noisy thoughts.
A fish is the quietest animal in the world. Other quiet animals are: owls, sloths, octopuses, beavers or house cats.
The loudest animal of all
Not only can baleen whales emit calls that travel farther than any other voice in the animal kingdom, these giants of the deep also create the loudest vocalisations of any creature on earth: the call of a blue whale can reach 180 decibels – as loud as a jet plane, a world record.