the.com/loudness
the bully of the senses, shouting until your ears just stop arguing
means The quality or degree of being loud — how strong or intense a sound feels to the ear.
from From Old English 'hlud,' meaning loud, a word with deep Germanic roots and likely cousins in Dutch 'luid' and German 'laut.' These trace back to a Proto-Indo-European root '*kleu-,' meaning 'to hear' — so 'loud' originally meant something closer to 'heard,' i.e. the kind of sound that gets noticed. The '-ness' suffix, an old Germanic tool for turning adjectives into nouns, simply bundles the whole noisy quality into a single word.
- log scale
- every 10 decibels means ten times more sound energy
- pain threshold
- around 120 decibels physically hurts your ears
- loudness war
- music got squashed louder to win radio attention
- perceived double
- sound feels twice as loud only at +10 dB
- krakatoa
- 1883 eruption was heard 3,000 miles away
krakatoa eruption 1883 — heard 3,000 miles away in mauritius, loudest sound in recorded history at 310 decibels
saturn v rocket launch — apollo 11 in 1969 reached 204 decibels at launch pad, one of loudest human-made sounds