KNOW THE NOISE
OWN THE AMBIENCE
ABOUT AMBIENT
Our founder, Ben, bought a house in Norman Park in Brisbane's east after spending a long time overseas. As an acoustic engineer, Ben was concerned about noise. He noted planes enroute to Brisbane airport in the distance, local traffic turned off well before his home, and the sound of a passenger train was quiet behind a 4m noise barrier. What Ben forgot was the occasional freight train that shook the house at 2am.
To quote a famous movie line: "Just a soothing, relaxing, vibrating home huh?"
Our goal is to help you avoid the same mistake. Ambient has built a national transport noise map to allow homebuyers to understand their transport noise exposure before that contract goes unconditional.
The data behind the reports has also assisted studies into health impacts from transport noise, government planning overlays, and the impact transport noise has on property value.
Summary Reports
At Ambient, we understand that a home buyer may have an idea about the acoustic environment at their chosen property, but just want to check. Our summary reports provide a rating for your property's exposure to transport noise against others in the same suburb, and if the combined noise levels exceed those recommended by the Australian Environmental Health Standing Committee (enHealth)
Detailed Noise Reports
Our team of experts delves deeper into your future home. The detailed report is an extension from the summary, but includes maps and exposure levels separately for road, rail, and aircraft. We look into the risk of future infrastructure (e.g. a new road), and the risk of sleep disturbance. For home upgrades and new builds, we look into the transport planning overlays to help you understand the risk of additional construction costs to limit noise intrusion.
Raw Data
Ambient have teamed up with Aurin for the bulk supply of our noise data. These data include a 10m x 10m noise exposure grid for each state, separate for road, rail, and aircraft noise. We also provide a noise exposure level for each building, both at the most and least exposed facades. This data has been used to support health studies to understand the communities noise exposure, improve the accuracy of automatic valuation models for property, and to create planning overlays for government.
THE NOISE MODEL
Current coverage
The noise models used to calculate the transport noise levels feature the road network, traffic composition (i.e. percentage of trucks), and speeds of vehicles. For rail it considers the different types of trains, speeds, and track curvature. Aircraft noise is based on actual flight movements, the type of aircraft (including helicopters), speed, and altitude, among other things.
To support these noise sources, we have over 15 million buildings, terrain data, and noise barriers from the various State governments.
Noise levels are then calculated around every dwelling, and across the country at a 10m x 10m interval for road and rail, and higher for aircraft.
We combine the calculated noise exposure levels with census data to help understand the percentage of the population exposed to varying levels of noise exposure.
Coverage to date includes the states of NSW, ACT, VIC, TAS, SA, and the greater Perth, Darwin, and Alice Springs areas. Queensland is still under development and expected late 2024.
>15M
>1M
11%
1
Buildings captured
km of roads, supported by >40k km of rail, and thousands of aircraft build our database
Population exposued to noise that exceeds enHeath recommendations
Unique data provider
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If you have any questions or would like to learn more about our services, please fill out the following form and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Head Office
Ambient Maps Pty Ltd
Suite 303, Level 3, South Tower
527 Gregory Terrace
Fortitude Valley, QLD 4006
Australia