this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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The prequel to the 'A Quiet Place' saga got me thinking.

spoiler alert!

There is a scene in which many humans march towards a safety point. Each individual human would have been relatively quiet, but because there are a lot of them (potentially hundreds), they end up being, as a whole, loud enough to alert the monsters so they get all killed.

This would suggest that many sources of noise which are near to each other and generate more or less the same amount of noise end up adding up so that the end result in dB is more or less the sum of the individual dB levels.

But then again, it's fiction.

Back to reality, I work in a room full of different servers which have also very different levels of noise. I have noticed that from my standpoint, the noise of the quietest server seems to disappear whenever the loudest is running, so it kind of does blow my mind how our perception of noise works...

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Sound is complicated. Its both physics and perception.

The decibel scale is logarithmic. If you double the energy you increase the dB level by 3. Two people will be about 3 dB higher, four people would be 6, eight people would increase the level by 9 dB, sixteen would be 12 dB higher and so on.

Some people in this thread are talking about destructive interference. That really only happens in noise canceling headphones, or situations designed to cause it. In open air, its not really an issue that comes up. I've never become quieter by playing an instrument with someone else. It just doesn't work like that.

What lets the monster hear you is the peak volume, not the minimum or average, so it will be close to the 3 dB doubling rule.

There's also perception. Your brain does a ton of filtering of sound information. Your brain is constantly trying to pick out the important sounds and ignore the rest. That's why the quieter severs seem quieter when something louder happens. Also that's why some people use white noise machines to sleep.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is a very good, comprehensive and comprehensible answer. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Two people will be about 3 dB higher, four people would be 6, eight people would increase the level by 9 dB, sixteen would be 12 dB higher and so on.

This is only the case if they're making identical sounds in phase with each other. The real life scenario of people walking would not scale in this way as there are too many variables. No two footsteps are the same no matter how hard you try.

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