“I wish I could hear what living there actually sounds like before I sign.”
The Acoustic Survey
For buyers, renters, agents, landlords, and developers
Every check on a property tells you about the building. None of them tell you what it sounds like to live there. A small calibrated acoustic sensor deployed in the property for a week captures the real soundscape: the bin lorry on Tuesday morning, the train rumble at 6:42, the upstairs neighbour’s washing machine on Sunday night. The output is an acoustic report comparable to a traditional noise survey at a fraction of the cost.
The use cases run from pre-purchase due diligence to landlord baseline documentation to noise-dispute mediation. The smartphone version, where a buyer takes a 60-second sample on a viewing, is the lighter companion that pulls people into the paid hardware survey.
What makes this hard
Recording audio in a domestic property touches UK GDPR. The product has to be engineered so that audio is processed on the device, only statistical features leave the property, and raw audio is never stored centrally. The legal posture is harder than the AI.
What you would get back
A week of a home, on one page
This is an illustrative sample, built to show the format rather than a real home. Every figure below is fabricated.
Acoustic Survey
Sample Report
- Subject
- First-floor two-bed conversion flat
- Monitoring period
- 7 consecutive days
- Sensor
- Class 2, living room, 1.5 m
- Overall rating
- Moderate, typical urban flat
47 dB
LAeq,16h
Daytime average
07:00–23:00, living room
37 dB
LAeq,8h
Night-time average
23:00–07:00, living room
68 dB
LAFmax
Loudest typical event
Refuse collection, Tue 06:40
31 dB
LAeq
Quietest hour
Around 03:00, most nights
The week, hour by hour
Each cell is the average interior sound level for one hour. The colour shows how loud the room was; the bin lorry on Tuesday morning and the rail line through the day are visible at a glance.
- Very quietbelow 35 dB
- Quiet35–41 dB
- Moderate42–47 dB
- Noticeable48–54 dB
- Loud55 dB and above
What made the noise
- Through-road traffic38%
- Rail pass-bys24%
- Neighbouring flats & building services19%
- Street & pedestrian11%
- Aircraft overflights8%
Share of classified events over the seven days.
Notable events
Rail pass-bys
61 dB LAFmaxDaily, ~06:42 then through the day
Airborne plus a low structure-borne rumble
Refuse collection
68 dB LAFmaxTuesday, 06:40
Reversing alarm and loading, about four minutes
Neighbouring appliance (spin cycle)
52 dB LAFmaxSunday, 21:30
Structure-borne, carried through the party wall
Street & social noise
59 dB LAFmaxFriday & Saturday, 23:00–01:00
Airborne, intermittent voices and car doors
How your privacy is protected
All audio is analysed on the sensor itself. Only statistical features ever leave the property: sound levels in decibels, event classifications, and timestamps. No raw audio is recorded, stored, or transmitted, so nothing said in the room can be reconstructed from this report.
Levels are read against recognised indoor guidance. BS 8233:2014 sets indoor guideline values of 35 dB LAeq for living rooms in the day and 30 dB LAeq for bedrooms at night; the World Health Organization sets night-noise guidelines for the European Region. This flat’s daytime average of 47 dB and night-time average of 37 dB both sit above those guideline values, which is typical for a conversion flat on a through-road near a rail line.
Where it earns its place
Three jobs the same report does
Pre-purchase due diligence
A buyer learns what the flat actually sounds like across a full week before they exchange, not from a ten-minute viewing on a quiet afternoon.
Landlord baseline documentation
A landlord records the soundscape at the start of a tenancy, so any later noise complaint has an objective reference point rather than two opposing memories.
Noise-dispute mediation
When neighbours disagree, a week of calibrated readings replaces he-said-she-said with a shared, time-stamped record both sides can look at.
A 60-second taster on a viewing
The lighter companion to the hardware survey: a buyer takes a 60-second sample on their phone during a viewing. It is a teaser, not the full picture, but it is what pulls people into the week-long calibrated survey when the decision really matters.
Straight answers
Questions about the Acoustic Survey
Tell us which one
If this is the conversation you want to have, tell us
We are spending our time on the concepts the market actually wants. If the Acoustic Survey is one you would use, as a buyer, a landlord, an agent or a developer, your note shapes what we build next.
The Acoustic Survey is a concept, not a product you can buy today. For the use cases that touch noise disputes, see how councils handle noise nuisance complaints (opens in a new tab), and the World Health Organization on environmental noise (opens in a new tab).