Have you ever moved into a beautiful new apartment only to discover on your first night that you can hear the roar of every plane that lands at a nearby airport? HowLoud is a service to help save you from this nightmare. We spoke with HowLoud Founder Brendan Farrell about how they’re using data to help you identify how noisy a place is before you move in.
| Company Name: | HowLoud |
| Located: | Los Angeles, CA |
| Factual Partner Since: | 2014 |
| Your Name and Title: | Brendan Farrell, Founder |
| Website: | www.howloud.net |
| Facebook: | www.facebook.com/HowLoudInc |
| Twitter: | @HowLoudInc |
| Kickstarter | Sound Map of North America |
Q: Introduce readers to HowLoud. What do you do?
A: HowLoud is an information service for noise. Imagine that you’re trying to find a new apartment or house. Before you drive over, HowLoud allows you to type in the address and get a Soundscore™ (our indicator of how loud an area is) and other relevant noise information for that location. That way you can know beforehand what to expect.
An example Soundscore™ for a quiet, residential neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Q: Why is location data important for HowLoud?
A: Our primary engineering work is to model noise from traffic at any point that we want. This really puts us on the micro-level of location information: we are able to differentiate down to specific buildings and homes and even different sides of a home. In addition to this, we look at data on business locations. Restaurants, bars, supermarkets, etc. — all of these places make noise. We use Factual data to identify where these businesses are so we can compute Soundscores™ for each place.
Q: Why did you choose Factual as your location data provider? What Factual products do you use?
A: We chose Factual because it’s so thorough and easy to use. Before we started, I looked at some sample data for a handful of locations I’m familiar with and don’t recall there ever being a missing place.
Q: What was the inspiration for HowLoud?
A: The inspiration was simple: I was looking for a new home and just assumed you could find information on noise somewhere. Then I realized that it wasn’t out there and before I knew it I ended up starting this company.
Q: What are your current goals for HowLoud? Are they different from your original goals?
A: The main goal remains the same: to provide a consumer-oriented and contemporary noise modeling and information source. Cities in the state of California all do noise studies. However, these studies are done according to different state regulations and state boards — they’re not intended for the consumer. You can think of HowLoud as a product for noise that’s analogous to consumer-focused weather services. Today, you can easily type in an address and get the weather information that you care about in your area (it’s sunny and warm right now in Los Angeles), instead of having to read some dense meteorological material. HowLoud can deliver similarly relevant, up to date, and easy to digest information on the sound around a place.
Q: What types of data are important for you to evaluate the sound in an area?
A: The most important component is vehicle traffic. The data that we take in answers: where are the roads, what’s the 3D topography, and what’s the traffic flow? Then, we use models to see how that noise propagates throughout the region. We need lots of detailed information like volume and speed of traffic to do this effectively. Next, we need to understand where the buildings are (partly to see how far they are from the sources of noise and partly because buildings themselves reflect and block sound). In addition we need data on particular businesses and where they are (bars and airports, for example, produce a lot of sound). There are all sorts of other important factors that we plan to incorporate into our models in the future such as weather and geological data, but our primary concern at the moment is refining our traffic models.
Q: What are some unexpected difficulties you’ve encountered while starting HowLoud?
A: There are a lot of mapping services available, but many of the ones we use do not let you easily mix and match with other services. If we are getting some data from one source, we cannot always display it on another map. Learning to work around these constraints has been an interesting challenge.
Q: What is the loudest place you’ve ever lived?
A: I’d say the most recent one was a little unexpected. When I moved into this apartment, I didn’t realize that the people in the front never used their balconies even though the people in the back did. It turns out it’s so loud in the front that it’s just not reasonable to use it. These aren’t things that are apparent when you move into an apartment — you see a balcony and you assume that you’re going to use it. Part of the goal of HowLoud is to help you identify these things before you move in and learn the hard way.
- Julie Levine, Marketing Associate
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