From March 17 to May 11 2020, 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].