The Quiet Project: A national environmental noise survey undertaken during lockdown

The COVID-19 lockdown created a new kind of environment both in the UK and globally. A time-critical working group was formed with the aim of gathering crowd-sourced baseline noise levels and other supporting information across the UK and Ireland during lockdown. The acoustics community was mobilised through existing networks, engaging private companies, public organisations, and academics to gather data. A website was designed and developed to advertise the project, provide instructions and to formalise the uploading of high-quality noise data, observations, photos, and video. More than one thousand days of data was collected at one hundred and two locations. This data has been analysed to provide Day, Evening and Night-time noise levels using four acoustic parameters for three types of environments: Urban, Rural and Suburban. The dataset has been compared to the previous England and Wales National Noise Survey. The databank will be made publicly available to assist future research.