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If it's a peak sound of 104dB it's not terribly loud. The loudness of sounds is measured in decibels (dB). Sounds that are too loud or loud sounds over a long time, can damage your hearing. In this range, sounds are audible but you may have trouble distinguishing them from other sounds if you are somewhere noisy.Ĭonsidering this, how loud is 87 decibels?Įvery day we hear a variety of sounds. This is the decibel level of quiet sounds. Secondly, how loud is 45 decibels? Sounds that create decibel levels between 0 and 30 include whispers and the ticking of a watch. Researchers have found that people who are exposed over long periods of time to noise levels at 85 dBA or higher are at a much greater risk for hearing loss. Any sound at or above 85 dBA is more likely to damage your hearing over time. Sounds at or below 70 dBA are generally considered safe. Oxygen torch (121 dB).Īccordingly, how many decibels is too loud? That actually might be a reasonably playable solution with the veneer of scientific accuracy behind it.Military jet aircraft take-off from aircraft carrier with afterburner at 50 ft (130 dB). Better (or worse) hearing capability, or better/worse propagation conditions just shift you up and down the "detection distance" table.
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You might actually have an easier time categorizing noise sources as broad categories (insanely loud, like jet planes, artillery fire, big explosions, at 150dB very quiet, like a whisper or an arrow whizzing by at 40dB), and then giving table columns that provide distances where you'd hear it. Gunfire inside an abandoned mall? You'll probably hear it everywhere.but you probably will have a hard time figuring out where it's coming from (lots of high reflective surfaces). Gunfight in dense forest covered in fog? Sound probably won't carry as far. But scaling the doublings one way or the other based on a SWAG might be more than adequate. Really interesting reading.Īll of that is probably waaaay too much effort for an RPG, especially if you're computing it live. I need to see if I can find a copy of the paper that documented the process NASA uses to estimate sound and blast hazard zones for space launches.
How far does the sound of a gunshot travel plus#
Ground terrain, ground cover (trees, vegetation, rocks, water), sound-reflective objects (buildings, plus atmospheric effects like inversions), temperature, pressure, humidity, air density and on and on. Sound modeling and propagation is really complicated. Being off by 2-4x isn't bad at all, considering.Ĭlick to expand.Absolutely. It's by no means a perfect abstraction, but the above figures feel pretty reasonable to me (as order-of-magnitude estimates). You can easily hear a passing jetliner at 30-50k feet plus some horizontal distance (10-20km). The plane is audible outdoors (70dB) out to roughly 50km (again, off by a doubling or two). The jet plane, 140dB at 50m, would be 170dB at 1m-ish, working the math the opposite direction. The pistol peak dB seems high, but I honestly haven't looked. You can easily hear small arms fire several miles away under good conditions. Which is probably off by a bit, but not as much as you'd think. It probably doesn't get quiet enough to blend into background outdoor noise until 60dB, which is 6 more doublings, or 32km. So a handgun, assuming 170dB at one meter, drops to 164 at 2m, 158 at 4m.and still 116dB at 512m. I'll have to look at some of the test specifications, but as a rough order magnitude estimate, figure the baseline distance is somewhere between 1-10 meters for most things. Noise measurements are usually not at the actual noise source (muzzle of gun, for instance). Is there a standard assumption of how far away most decibel measurements are taken at? were that 170 db measured at a 1000 ft, we could easily expect a gunshot to be heard clearly many many miles away. doubling that very small initial area would result in a very small sound at distance of only a few ft away. If for example we were to imagine that the pistol was 170 db measured at 1/1000 for an inch from the gun. the standard equation drops 6 db every doubling of distance from the initial reference point. Lets say my handy on line reference tells me that a gunshot is 170 db. its the initial sample area I don't know where to stat with. 2) the physics formula of dropping 6 db for ever doubling of distance is pretty easy to make sense of. 1 it's very easy to find lists on the internet of how loud things are in decibels. but there is a physics problem that is screwing me over and I could use some info from somebody. I figured starting the the decibel volume of various sounds would be a good start and then figuring out how decibel lower over distance. For the home brew system I am working on, I wanted to work in a mechanic for the likelihood of being able to perceive various sounds over distance.