Tag Archives: dygraphs

Graph the noise level in your office in 15 minutes

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This is a recurrent complaint in any open space: “There is too much noise!” (the other one is that the climate is too cold/too hot). There are some usual culprits, but it is nice to have data to back your complaints up.

I will here show you how to generate a real-time noise level graph in 15 minutes without any material beside our laptop or desktop, not even a microphone is needed. This is a dirty hack, but it works™ and can be put in place very quickly with just a few command lines. The steps, which will be mostly cut&paste are:

  • install a noise recorder tool
  • set up nginx to serve the data recorded
  • use a nice javascript library to display the data properly

I used soundmeter, a python tool. So first, install it:

# make sure we can install python packages
apt-get install virtualenv
# install required dependencies for building soundmeter
apt-get install python-dev portaudio19-dev python-dev alsa-utils
# install other useful tools for later display
apt-get install nginx expect-dev
# set up a directory for the tool
mkdir $HOME/soundmeter
# create virtualenv
virtualenv $HOME/soundmeter
# activate it
source $HOME/soundmeter/bin/activate
# install soundmeter
pip install soundmeter

Et voilà, your recorder is setup.

But do you not need a microphone? Well, either you have a laptop with a build in microphone, either you can just plug an headphone, which is basically a microphone used the other way (produce instead of record sound).

To get data, a one-liner is enough:

soundmeter --segment 2 --log /dev/stdout 2>/dev/null | unbuffer -p perl -p -e 's/\s*(\d+)\s+(.{19})(.*)/"$2,". 20*log($1)/e' > meter.csv

The explanation is as follow:

  • soundmeter: run soundmeter forever (–seconds to limit the duration)
  • --segment 2: output data every 2 seconds (default 0.5 seconds, but is very spiky)
  • --log /dev/stdout: default data on stdout is not useful for graphing, we need to log to a file. Use /dev/stdout as file to actually log to stdout
  • 2>/dev/null: do not pollute output
  • |: the output is not in a great format, it needs to be reformatted
  • unbuffer -p: by default data is buffered, which is annoying for real-time view. This does what the name suggests
  • perl -p -e: yummy, a perl regexp!
  • s///e: this will be a substitution, where the replacement part is a perl expression
  • \s*(\d+)\s+(.{19})(.*): record value and timestamp stripped of the milliseconds
  • “$2,”: display first the timestamp with a comma for csv format
  • 20*log($1): the values from soundmeter are in rms, transform them in dB via the formula 20 * log (rms)
  • > meter.csv: save data in a file

In short, we do the following transformation on the fly and write it to a csv file:

2015-09-22 13:36:13,082 12 => 21.5836249,2015-09-22 13:36:13

You now have a nice csv file. How to display it? Via a nice html page with the help of a javascript library, dygraphs,of course.

Set up nginx by adding in /etc/sites-enabled/noise the following content (replace YOUR_HOME by your actual home directory, of course):

server {
 listen 80;
 root YOUR_HOME/soundmeter;
}

and restart nginx:

service nginx restart

Then setup you page in $HOME/soundmeter/noise.html:

<html>
<head>
<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/dygraph/1.1.1/dygraph-combined.js"></script>

<style>
#graphdiv2 { position: absolute; left: 50px; right: 10px; top: 50px; bottom: 10px; }
</style>

</head>
<body>
<div id="graphdiv2"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
 g2 = new Dygraph(
 document.getElementById("graphdiv2"),
 "http://localhost/meter.csv", // path to CSV file
 {
 delimiter: ",",
 labels: ["Date", "Noise level"],
 title: ["Noise (in dB)"],
 showRoller: true,
 }
 );
</script>
</body>
</html>

You can of course replace localhost by your IP to publish this page to your colleagues.

Now just go to http://localhost/noise.html:

noise