# Noise in my balcony: a lockdown history

From March 17 to May 11, France was in lockdown due to COVID-19 [1, 2]. At these times, leaving your house was limited to essential displacements (buying groceries, work if working from home was impossible, short close-to-home workout, etc). Several locations remained closed after May 11 (like movie theaters), but “non-essential movements” were allowed. As expected, these restrictions had an incredible impact on the motion of people and vehicles, thus, the urban noise. I live next to a 4 lanes avenue, about 8 km from an airport and 3 km from a hospital, so transportation noise is something that is part of my routine. A few days into the start of moving restrictions I had an idea to somehow measure the effect of the lockdown on the noise pollution I’m confronted.

For that, from March 31 to June 30 (92 days), I went to my balcony at 18h30 and recorded 5 minutes of ambiance sound using my smartphone (with Smart Recorder app, at the sampling frequency 44.1 kHz and with automatic gain control disabled). All analysis, from data treatment to plotting, is performed in Python. An example of what I recorded is presented next (note that the audios are downsampled and compressed for publication):

Sample of recording (May 28, after the end of lockdown) where we can hear, for example, vehicles passing by [1:40-2:00, 3:15-3:25] and an airplane landing [2:03-2:40].

# The sound of a bottle being filled

I got interested in seeing how do the spectral distribution of everyday sounds look like. So I got an app in my phone (Smart Recorder) and started recording them. The most interesting result (until now) is from the simplest sound I have recorded: a bottle of milk being filled at my kitchen’s tap. I present the audio, associated spectrogram and the theoretical analysis in this post. All the work is performed in Python, from reading the data to plotting.

# Audio recording

Here is the audio:

As it sounds, it is just a bottle being filled with water. At the beginning ($$t$$ < 1 second) there is nothing, until I open the tap. After about 32 seconds, the bottle is full and water is overflowing to the sink. There is a constant component lied to the impact of the particles on the bottom of the bottle/water column. Besides that, an indistinguishable and interesting tone that is changing in time can be heard. This sound is a resonance of air column with a closed-end (that is actually the water) and an open-end:

Change of resonance frequency with the air column height.

There is an increase of the frequency with the reduction of the wavelength $$\lambda$$, that is linear in time until around 20 seconds. After that the increase is not constant due to the non linear modification of the available space for the air inside the bottle originated from the reduction of the diameter with the height.