The sounds of life in Boston — from blaring music to jackhammers to vehicle noise — are the laboratory of Erica Walker, a doctoral candidate in environmental epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who is bicycling around Boston mapping noise levels in the city.
“You’ve got planes, you’ve got trains, you’ve got automobiles,” Walker said on December 3, 2015 in the Dorchester Reporter (MA).
She’s interested in community noise and how people respond to it. Her plan is to measure noise levels at more than 400 sites around the city at various times.
It was noisy neighbors, in fact, that triggered the idea for Walker’s study. So far she has found that the two noisiest neighborhoods in Boston during the daytime are East Boston and Dorchester’s Savin Hill.
Read the Dorchester Reporter article: She’s bicycling around Boston, measuring the sounds of a city