In Spring 2025, the Noise Project announced the deployment in Providence of the first in a series of residential sound monitors, designed to ascertain both baseline noise levels and daily / seasonal noise trends around the city, after Mayor Brett Smiley failed to follow through on a statement supporting it.
The Project’s first monitor was installed on the west side, and was joined six months later by a second one on the east side, and a third on the north side in Spring 2026 — with the south side coming later this year.
The graph below shows the minute-to-minute average of the sound-level data collected by all three noise monitors.1 The purple horizontal line is the city’s residential sound limit, which is 65 decibels (dBA) from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. and 55 dBA from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
Average Residential Sound Levels (in decibels)2
Hover your cursor over the graph to see the decibel (dB) levels at specific times. You can also scroll back 24 hours, and click on the date to view other days or on the colored A, C, and Z “weighting” icons to see how they compare. For more info on weightings, see footnote 2.
The goal of the Noise Project’s city-wide sound-monitor network is to 1) identify areas where residents face the most persistent exposure to unhealthy noise — and thus where the city should focus its abatement efforts, and 2) determine how effective those efforts actually are. In the relatively short time the monitors have been operating, they have consistently registered:
- Median night-time noise levels well above Providence’s residential limits — and punctuated by recurrent, sleep-disrupting late-night peaks (see below).
- A significant daily rise in noise levels prior to 7:00 a.m., in flagrant disregard of the city’s sound ordinance — This threshold shift generally begins at between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m., and is almost entirely generated by deliberately loud vehicles.3
- Recurrent hourly peaks between 70 and 80 decibels (and regularly exceeding 90 dB) — more than twice as loud as legal sound limits4 — both day and night. This ‘impulsive’ (sudden) ambient noise is associated with adverse health effects, including high blood-pressure and cardiac disease.
All three findings of the Project’s “citizen science” initiative above are consistent with similar academic research in Boston 10 years ago, and corroborate other sound measurements showing that Providence noise levels are comparable to those of a major U.S. city multiple times its size and population.5
The sound-level monitor data indicate that, throughout one-term Mayor Smiley’s four years in office — and despite his declared intent to reduce excessive noise in the city — volume levels from chronic noise sources such as vehicles, house parties, and commercial establishments remained significantly higher than allowed by city ordinances, on an ongoing basis.
Smiley ran for re-election in 2026, but did not heavily tout supposed quality-of-life improvements — including and especially noise — during his first term,6 and continued to face questions about it during neighborhood meetings, media appearances, and campaign events. He lost in the primary election.
He did claim that Providence is mostly quieter than before he became mayor, but didn’t offer any proof.7 And even he could somehow show that the city is less noisy in late 2026 than in 2023, how would residents know whether it is due to his efforts (such as they were) and not something he had no control over? He never said.
By eschewing (after he was elected) the sound-level measurements he supported as a candidate, Smiley avoided accountability for the continued high noise-levels documented by Project sound monitors, but in doing so also precluded himself from claiming credit for purported reductions. He can’t have it both ways.
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1 It’s important to recognize that averaging the minute-to-minute monitor data effectively compresses the volume range the graph depicts, because a peak or valley in one area is offset by less-dynamic levels elsewhere. For more localized sound data that more directly reflects the noise levels that residents actually experience in different areas, visit our East Side, West Side, and North Side monitor pages.
2 All three colored data lines on the graph depict the exact same sound data, but two are “weighted” (filtered) to focus on different frequencies within those sounds. The green line is “A-weighted” sound data, which emphasizes the frequencies of the human voice, and filters out much of the low-frequency “bass” sound that comprises most of the excessive noise inflicted on Providence residents on a daily basis. The orange line is “C-weighted” data, which retains far more lower-range bass than dBA. And the blue line is referred to as “Z-weighted” data, but is actually un-weighted (i.e., the “raw” sound data with no filtering).
Like most U.S. municipalities, Providence bases its noise measurements on A-weighted data that, as the graph above demonstrates, usually depicts noise levels as being significantly lower than either C-weighted or unweighted data, and thus inaccurately represents actual noise levels in the city. For more details on sound weighting — including a visual depiction of the various weightings — and the exponential decibel scale (see footnote 4), visit our “How Sound is Measured” page.
3 Not surprisingly, the observed sources of most of the noise data collected by the sound monitors are motor vehicles with modified mufflers or over-amplified audio systems — the two most-prevalent noise sources in Providence that residents have consistently reported to the Noise Project. Without vehicle noise, the city would be much quieter, especially at night.
4 Contrary to popular misconception, the decibel (dB) scale is not linear — i.e., it does not increase at a constant rate, such that a sound that’s twice as high in dB is therefore twice as loud. Instead, it’s logarithmic (exponential), which means it rises at an increasing rate, so that a 90-dB sound peak is not 60% louder than Providence’s 55-dB night-time limit, but actually more than 100 times the legal maximum, and thus can easily penetrate nearby buildings and wake sleeping residents. What needs to be that loud?
5 This is further corroborated by sound readings collected by Brown University students with hand-held sound-level monitors, as reported in a rare article acknowledging excessive noise levels in Providence by the Boston Globe’s Rhode Island bureau.
6 In fact, the mayor’s 2026 election-campaign literature seemed to almost entirely abandon references to the qualify-of-life (QOL) focus of his first campaign in 2022, which helped him elected. (He did cite efforts to curtail ATVs, but that initiative began under his predecessor, who did not endorse his re-election.) We assume that, if Smiley could have cited broad quantitative QOL improvements, he would have done so. Instead, his re-election campaign focused largely on semantic public-safety claims.
7 In response to the Noise Project’s survey of 2022 mayoral candidates, Smiley stated that, “As part of a review of the noise level in our city and improved enforcement, noise should be measured on an ongoing basis in order to produce consistent data.” On the basis of that and other answer to our survey questions, we endorsed both Smiley and then-City Council member Nirva LaFortune.
After he was elected, however, the city never actually measured noise levels on an ongoing basis. (In response to our 2026 survey questions, Smiley claimed that sporadic license-enforcement and event-related sound measurements are a sufficient substitute. They’re not.) Without knowing what the city’s sound levels were when he took office, it was difficult four years later to convince residents / voters that his noise-reduction efforts had actually been effective, and thus that he merited a second term.