[Music] with millions living here it's not surprising London can be noisy but is it getting too loud we're going to have a go at finding out meet Samantha she's bothered about London's nightlife definitely in bars at night how can anyone hear anything and Ian wants to know about London's streets in many areas traffic noise is becoming more prevalent so we send both of them on a mission to measure the noise levels with sound meters and I'm on the underground trying to find out which two Bly is the noisiest Samantha is a comedian so my name
is Samantha Baines she often works in loud environments and a few months ago she got some devastating news I never thought at 30 years old I would be told I needed hearing aids I never thought I'd been exposed to that level of noise she wants to know if London's bars and venues can get so noisy they can damage hearing you will be able to look at the average sound over the total duration so she's meeting an expert I'm interested in whether there are potentially harmful sounds dr. Joe Cellini works at the UCL ear Institute and
he lends Samantha a sound meter to take into the West End all you need to do is pick a sound source that you want to find out how loud it is and point it towards it so it's as if my ear was receiving yeah okay well good luck in the next few hours I'm going to go about a normal evening in London so I'm meeting a friend for dinner we're gonna have some drinks go to a couple of bars here has also been to the UCL lab to get the meter and now his mission is
to measure some of London's busiest streets we're on Euston Road and we're walking westwards towards Euston station well the noise is relentless this icon a gray auditory fog which just covers everything with Ian focused on his tasks it's time for me to go underground and it doesn't take long to find something worth measuring all the numbers are being recorded back on the surface Samantha's enjoying her evening out moving from bar to restaurant to buff sounds really reverberating I'm to be honest I'm really shocked on the streets Ian's route takes him from Houston Road that along
Oxford Street and ends at Parliament Square and he's passionate about sound recording because he used to be a sound archivist at the British Library on the shelves there's an old record that's worth listening to again well it's one of the oldest surviving recordings of Street Sounds in London well I'd be quite interested just to make a comparison recording and then we can compare now with 1928 so how do they compare it was back to the British Library to find out 20 1728 Modern Life in Leicester Square sounds a bit more full-on when it was in
1928 back underground I've already measured several lines it's so noisy I've been advised by our UCL expert to wear ear defenders and it's not just me taking precautions Roberta frequently uses the tube and always wears earplugs [Music] slowly Florian is also a tube passenger but with a specialist interest in acoustics and he started his own study asking if London is louder than Paris I thought you know as an acoustician it would be very interesting thing to look at over on the metro I decided to join him as he carried on with this study in Paris
we've measured about 40 to 50 certain stations I would say this far less banging and banging and become either whiz bang against the rail so it's definitely more comfortable journey of noise levels Florian still has more stations to measure but Paris did seem quieter while he continues his research ours is almost coming to its end samantha has an appointment with dr. Shalini he's done the number crunching on her night out so what we can see here are the different sound levels that we measured these two bars bar 2 and 3 they're at a loudness which
is worrying and could potentially impact on people's hearing the sound level got up to 112 decibels and in an environment like that you wouldn't want to be there for more than a minute for Samantha it means a rethink on how she spends her evenings in London I have moderate hearing us if that gets worse I could be deaf in one ear I want to be extra careful about you know I'm gonna get myself some earplugs but what about the streets how noisy and then it was time for Ian to get his results Hayden which two
streets had the loudest noise levels Regent Street and Leicester Square it is noisy but thankfully it's not damaging that's equivalent to a loud vacuum cleaner I wouldn't really like to be in the same room as a vacuum cleaner being used all the time every hour of the day but yes as a comparison I guess it holds true as for me after spending one week underground measuring ten lines in zone 1 and zone 2 the data is complete it takes dr. Shalini a few more days to process and then he has the verdict so the central
line has the loudest section or out of all of the tube lines and it basically gets as loud as almost 110 decibels to put that into perspective that's approximately as loud as going to a gig or a rock concert also on average the Victoria Line is the loudest followed by the Jubilee northern and central at or above 85 decibels which if this was a work environment would be considered so loud that you would have to wear ear defenders I think what these measurements show is that the tube is sufficiently loud to warrant further investigation certainly
shows that it can be loud enough to damage people's hearing so what does Transport for London say we're confident that nobody out there is exposed to an unsafe noise level of course there are parts of the network that are noise and others but you would need to be exploited exposed to that noise for a significant period of time for it to cause any hearing damage but one of the things that we're doing of course is to look at things like quiets attract fasting so we grind the rounds we replace the rounds all of that is
designed to give a smoother journey but also quite a journey but after our research UCL's dr. Shalini says some tube passengers regularly hearing this could think about taking precautions for people using the noisier lines regularly and for long journeys then it certainly suggests that it would be worthwhile than using hearing protection
