Looking for a quiet restaurant? Use this app, now in Cincinnati - Cincinnati.com

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Bubble tea, ravioli and gelato were among the most delicious tastes of the month. Polly Campbell, pcampbell@enquirer.com

Greg Scott just wanted to find a quiet place to eat. Because he has a hearing impairment, it was practically impossible for him to find a restaurant in New York City where he could comfortably carry on a conversation.

Being able to search ahead of time for noise ratings of restaurants would have been helpful, but he couldn't find anything. "It's frustrating. It takes an enormous amount of concentration for me to listen in public places, " said Scott. 

So, he decided to crowd-source it. He created an app that allowed a lot of people to take noise levels at restaurants and other public places and share them.

That app, SoundPrint, started with New York, expanded to include other cities and is now available in Cincinnati. 

Most of its users are not hearing impaired. They're just looking for a place to relax, eat and talk. With lots of hard, sound-reflective surfaces, close tables, music and people talking, restaurants do tend to be loud. A conversation at a table of more than two can be stressful. 

Here's how the app works: When you're at a restaurant, you use the decibel meter to take a sound level reading for 15 seconds. You upload it to share. It will be time-stamped and shared. You can also add additional comments, such as what part of the restaurant you were in. The more people who use it, the more useful the numbers will be. 

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If you're looking for a place to eat, you check the listings, find a restaurant and see an average of all the readings that have been uploaded. It will show a rating of quiet, moderate or loud.

A good decibel reading, one at which conversation is easy, is 73-74. Too loud is 75-80. In fact, over 75 can be damaging to your ears. Those numbers don't seem that different from each other. But the decibel levels scale is logarithmic. In other words, the loudness level is multiplied at each number.  

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What SoundPrint shows about Cincinnati restaurants so far is that the sound levels are on average 77 dBA, which is a bit lower than the noisiest cities on the app. But chances are at a Cincinnati restaurant, the noise will be too loud for conversation. Only about 35% measured so far in the app are conducive to conversation. Most of those are at a moderate level.  

"People don't realize how loud places have gotten," said Scott, who is concerned about the general level of noise pollution in daily life.  "Urban noise is louder, people listen on earphones. Typically people have lost their hearing in their 60s and 70s. Going forward it's going to be in their 50s," he said. "Noise pollution isn't just dangerous to hearing, it has non-auditory health effects such as stress, anxiety and cardiovascular risks.   

The app isn't a money-maker.

For Scott, it's a public health issue, and he hopes to share his data with health departments. "People don't make changes until they see the data," he said. 

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