Sound Pollution Monitoring System and Social Awareness Creation in Modern City

Abstract

Sound pollution has become one of the primary causes of environmental pollution in Dhaka City. Nowadays, sound intensity exceeds people’s safe hearing limit. Proper assessment of sound levelin Dhaka is required to properly address this pollution. To this end, this project proposes asystematic approach including an updated data set of sound levels to assess sound pollution throughout Dhaka city. Following the methodology, a survey has been conducted by selecting major locations and measuring the sound levels at those locations throughout the city. Moreover, we divided Dhaka city into two parts i.e., Dhaka North and Dhaka South. The sound level meter Lutron SL-4012 is utilized for collecting data from the selected locations choosing peak hours. The findings show that all the monitored locations are facing critical sound pollution. A few highly polluted areas such as Newmarket, Shahbagh, Paltan, Gulistan, Motijheel from Dhaka South and Mohammadpur Beribadh, Gabtoli, Farmgate, Kawran Bazar, Mohakhali from Dhaka North are also identified. Moreover, this project also proposes a potential sound mitigation approach involving device-based sound metering and displaying to reduce sound pollution. As a solution to our addressed problem, a prototype is built for the project and validated with the sound meter for accuracy checking. Machine Learning is used for sound classification, and for recognition of sound by utilizing MFCC characteristics. This project provides a significant, updated overview of sound pollution throughout Dhaka City. Furthermore, the proposed solution has the potential to raise public awareness and it can minimize sound pollution in Dhaka city upon large-scale deployment.