THE NOISIEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD

Usually, noise awareness initiatives hardly attract the interest of the general public, and therefore, the effect that they produce is usually quite limited. On the contrary, there are other outrageous issues that arise from time to time, in many different countries, capturing the media's attention, and gaining an impact that should be reserved for more serious and straightforward noise educational and awareness actions. On view of the previous, the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) launched in 2014 quite a peculiar awareness initiative. Its goal was to take advantage of a question that has the potential to impact media, in order to produce an full awareness action, which informs the general public of noise health risks. "Which is the noisiest country in the world?" This is an apparently simple question that can have several different interpretations, depending on the criteria we use to face the term "noisiest country". If we focused on decibels, we could describe the source generating the loudest instantaneous sound level, or the time averaged sound level, or the spatial averaged sound level... If we focused on people, we could describe the most populated and exposed areas. If we considered noise effects, we could focus on a specific time period,... Probably, it would be quite difficult to agree a unique technical criteria, but in this initiative the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) proposes to forget about objective data, and only consider people's subjective response. A web survey was published using Google Forms in two languages: Spanish and an English, and, almost half of the 337 responses were collected in each language. There were participants from 56 different countries, and Spain was the one contributing with most of them, as this is an action promoted by an Spanish university.