ICM Final Idea | ICM # 7

Honk Board

Honk Board collects data on car honks and displays the medium and short term trends to the user.

This was originally an idea for a Pcomp Project, however I realized that the coding aspects of this project are more interesting to me (Pcomp Project Description). I came to this idea from living next to the Queensboro Bridge in NYC and hearing a constant parade of car horns. Initially my goal was to build a physical sign that would ultimately dissuade people from honking. However as I worked on a P5 Sketch to illustrate my point I realized that It could work as a piece of software for an individual user(s). At this point I’m interested in representing this form of sound pollution as a kind of weather report. I envision placing an android tablet in my window, running this program and having the program automatically calibrate and document all of the honking it hears. This visual component lets the user know its working and gives a suggestion as to whether this particular day or week is better or worse than usual. Hopefully this program could be used by anyone who wanted to document the honking taking place in their neighborhood.

My questions for the class:

How do I best represent positive or negative change in the rate of honking?

What factors besides number of honks might be useful?

What data should I collect on the honks, how do I store it?

 

Early Version: 

Here is a early version I was working on to demonstrate how a physical sign might work (https://11bsouth.com/HonkSignMockUp/)

 

Inspiration: 

I was inspired to work on this by the “Your speed is…” signs and some recent media attention to the sound levels in my neighborhood

Article about honking on the Queensboro Bridge

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