The World's Loudest Noises - An Audio Infographic

Loud noises can be unpleasant. But how loud is too loud? The World’s Loudest Noises is an interactive infographic from Air Conditioning Company that explains the loudest noises in the world and how much damage they could do to your ears. So next time your air conditioning kicks on and you feel like complaining… Just remember, there is always something louder.

Turn your volume down before you start clicking!

Our initial attempt to explain how loud air conditioners are via an internet page was, in our opinion, a minor disaster.

An indisputable fact is that 99.999% of us haven’t got a clue what a decibel either sounds like or looks like! Let’s be honest, we didn’t even know ourselves precisely what a decibel was!

So we started to delve into the dark world of decibels to make the blinking things easier to understand. We initially wanted to create an amazingly informative infographic to best explain how loud our air conditioners are. However, we didn’t know where the ‘cut-off’ point should have been and we got somewhat carried away until we found the worlds loudest noise!

Despite all of our in-depth research, noise levels and decibels are still controversial and subjective. We found so many different accounts of how loud the same sound was. Indeed, most of our research showed that an aeroplane taking off is louder than a spaceship launch and surely this cannot be the case. Further investigation revealed that people forget to mention how far away they were when actually measuring the sounds. Also, based in London, we don’t live close enough to Cape Canaveral to run around waving our own decibel meter…..

Have some fun clicking around on our all-singing-and-dancing infographic below. Those of you who wish for a more academic approach can scroll to the bottom to check out our initial research.

An audio infographic! This is a new way to create an interactive infographic. Each of the sounds listed in the infographic above is clickable to play an audio sample of each noise. It’s more fun and entertaining than actually representing the decibels because there’s no way your computer speakers (or your mobile phone speakers) can reproduce some of the decibel levels shown here. Plus you have volume control.

I’m really disappointed that the vertical scale is out of proportion. The sounds should be accurately placed along the decibel scale, not just evenly spaced no matter what the values are. That’s just poor data visualization.

There’s a sharing issue that happens with an interactive infographic like this one. I was bale to get the embed code from the publisher, so all of the click-to-play sounds should work here on Cool Infographics as well. However, most people that share the infographic will only grab the JPG image file or click the sharing buttons, and that loses all of the interactivity included in the code. The sounds also don’t work on many iOS and mobile devices.

What other infographic topics could include sounds?

Thanks to David for sending in the link!

The Lifespan of Storage Media

Crashplan has just released The Lifespan of Storage Media, a comprehensive guide to how long your data will last.  Designed by Mike Wirth with InfoNewt, this infographic compares the expected lifespans of popular media types used over the last 100 years to save different kinds of information: computer data, photos, videos and audio.  Do your 8-tracks still play?

As each new form of data storage comes on the scene, the market is at first enamored with its compactness, convenience and hoped-for data longevity. But invariably, the reality of physical vulnerability and a limited lifespan remains. Eventually, all media fails, but Cloud backup is forever.

This was a fantastic project to work on, and the data research was the most challenging piece.  We had to find data to support both an average expected life and an extended “with extreme care” life.  We certainly found some contradictory data sources, and ultimately used data we felt was the most commonly accepted in the industry.

Do you have old computer backups burned to CDs, tapes or even hard drives on your shelf?  Don’t count on being able to read the data from them too much longer!  The short lifespan for many of these types of media that people use everyday to archive their personal photos and videos was most surprising.

Thanks to the team at Crashplan for a great project!

11 Steps To Voice-Over Success

Interested in trying to make money as an audio voice-over actor?  Thanks to 11 Steps to Voice-Over Success infographic from Voices.com, now you know how to get started!

Voice over actors give life to animation works, enlighten us through film narration and bring energy to radio commercials. The industry is estimated to be worth $12.3 billion worldwide, and is growing because of new digital mediums such as mobile radio, apps with audio podcasting. If you’re interested in voice acting, learn the 11 steps to voice-over success in this amazing infographic.

This design combines a process flow, some data visualizations, some illustrations and text descriptions in an easy to follow layout.  The large colored blocks for each step resemble following a board game path to make it simple for the reader to follow the process.

I think the design could have reduced the amount text much further.  I think there’s too much detail included to be quick to digest for the readers.  At the bottom there should have been the URL link to the original, full-size infographic (in addition to the Voices.com front page) and a copyright statement.

This design visualizes an 11-step process, and a good comparison would be the 10-step process design for How Affiliate Marketing Works I designed last year.  My approach was to give the reader the basics of the process, and then let them go to the website to get more details.  This design attempts to give the reader more complete information about each step of the process.  What do you think?

Thanks to Ashley for sending in the link!