The Quiet Project- the UK and Ireland Sound Environment during Lockdown

The Quiet Project was set up by the UK and Ireland acoustics community as a response to the first COVID-19 Lockdown of 2020. By bringing together professional bodies including the Institute of Acoustics and the Association of Noise Consultant with the academic community through the UK Acoustics Network to take measurements across all five nations.
A website, www.thequietproject.co.uk, was setup that provided the standard measurement procedures and data template to be followed plus instrumentation suppliers who were willing to freely distribute measurement instrumentation to those participants without the necessary acoustic kit. The measurement could then be uploaded to the website.
This allowed the gathering of high quality crowd source baseline noise levels with supporting information. Over one hundred rural, suburban, and urban environments were measured over a period of at least one week using 15 minute intervals during April to July 2020. The parameters measured include GPS location, façade correction, measurement height, LAeq, LA90, LA50, LA10 and optional sound spectrum, either in octave or one-third octave bands.
This makes the Quiet Project the largest noise survey undertaken in the UK. A complementary soundscape dataset is in the process of being processed.