I am impressed by the potential of projects like LASH ( http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?hl=en& ... 29855&z=13 ).
I would like a crowd-sourced environmental noise-map. At the simplest level, it could be just geo-tagged tweets on a map indicating the location of noise that people complain about. At the next level, it would have full spectrogram readings that could be interpolated across the map. At the most complex level that I have thought of, the data would also indicate periodicity - time of day, day of the week and season.
There is, for instance, a bar some distance from my home that plays live music two nights a week until 1 am. Some people hear the noise a considerable distance away (1.5 miles) while immediate neighbours hear nothing, due to the reflections and shielding of surrounding buildings. Getting the council to act on noise disturbance is very hard work that might be eased if there was evidence of a significant number of affected homes.
