What to do

Children & schools

WHO recommends ≤35 dB(A) inside classrooms. Schools near expressways routinely exceed 70 dB. Chronic noise impairs reading, memory, and cognitive development. This is not an individual problem — it is a policy failure.

Night workers & shift workers

WHO guidelines set 40 dB(A) Lnight for outdoor residential areas. Freight hubs, distribution centres, and transit depots impose a second noise burden on communities that already work night hours.

Renters & housing precarity

Homeowners can move. Tenants often cannot. Noise ordinance enforcement is weaker in areas with lower property values and higher tenant turnover. Documenting patterns over time — exactly what this app enables — is how tenants build cases.

Right to quiet

Access to quiet natural soundscapes is an environmental right. The EU's Environmental Noise Directive mandates the protection of 'quiet areas' in agglomerations. Urban green space is not just aesthetic — it is acoustic refuge.

Overlay community data

The Noise-Planet community layer shows crowdsourced noise measurements from around the world. Use it to contextualise your own readings, identify chronic hotspots others have documented, and understand your neighbourhood in a global acoustic frame.

Export as NoiseCapture GeoJSON

Your pins export in a format compatible with NoiseCapture and the OGC standard. Each feature carries laeq, timestamp, GPS coordinates, category, pin status (predicted/active/historical), and description. Attach this file to complaints, submit it to environmental agencies, or share it with researchers.

Collective cases are stronger

A single measurement establishes a data point. A month of measurements establishes a pattern. A neighbourhood of measurements — yours and your neighbours', overlaid with community data — establishes a crisis. Environmental agencies and courts respond to spatial patterns, not isolated incidents.

Participatory soundscape evaluation

Rather than delegating interpretation to technical experts, gather community members to collectively score acoustic environments. Walk a route together; record at each stop; then sit together and name what you heard, what it meant, and what it should mean for planning decisions. Technical measurements become evidence when a community has collectively decided what they prove. Export from Noisecatcher and project the pin map as a focus for group interpretation.

Graphic scoring & emotional body mapping

Quantitative dB readings cannot capture the felt impact of living inside a noise environment. Graphic scoring — drawing the shape of a sound, its rhythm, its violence — and emotional body mapping — locating where noise is felt in the body — allow non-technical participants to contribute testimony that numbers alone cannot produce. Combine these with Noisecatcher voice notes and pin descriptions to build a multi-register evidence corpus.

Live archiving

Record and share audio immediately, creating a real-time civic record before the event is reframed by official narrative. Radio With Palestine (RWP) demonstrates this method at scale: broadcasting unedited audio from occupied territories produces what it calls 'flat listening' — an omnidirectional document of the full acoustic context. At a local scale: stream or upload your Noisecatcher recordings in real time to a shared folder, a community radio station, or a Signal group. The distributed archive is harder to suppress than any single recording.

Acoustic counter-mapping

Official strategic noise maps are computed from infrastructure data — they model major sources but miss secondary ones, produce annual averages that conceal peak exposures, and tend to be more accurate in wealthier areas where monitoring infrastructure already exists. Counter-mapping fills these gaps: use Noisecatcher to measure where official maps are silent, document temporal patterns the averages erase, and produce an evidence base for community advocacy. Export your pins as GeoJSON and overlay them on official map data to show the gap between what the model predicts and what residents experience.

Collective evidence-building

A single measurement is a data point. A month of measurements is a pattern. A neighbourhood of measurements is a case. Coordinate with neighbours, community organisations, or local journalists to build overlapping, independent records of the same acoustic environment. Noisecatcher's GeoJSON export is compatible with NoiseCapture (Université Gustave Eiffel) — your pins can feed directly into community datasets. Environmental agencies and planning authorities respond to spatial patterns, not isolated incidents.