One interruption every eleven minutes

June 2026 · Oslo

It is a little past one in the morning and I am standing in the dark with a one-year-old on my shoulder. He has been asleep for about forty minutes, which is roughly how long it took to get him there, and now he is not, because a car has just gone full throttle out of the roundabout under our window with an exhaust that sounds like a shotgun with a stutter. Third time tonight.

We bought a flat downtown and knew there would be noise. That is part of the price and I was fine with it. What I had not priced in was this particular thing: a handful of people who have modified their cars to be as loud as possible and drive them past hundreds, probably thousands, of bedrooms, every evening, with nobody doing anything about it.

I am a sleep-deprived parent with a grudge, so I am biased. I also work with computers for a living, so instead of simply complaining I built a thing to give my complaint some objective numbers.

An average week of street noise, with each loud vehicle drawn as a spike above the background level — Here is an average week, with the background noise and each of the loud vehicles plotted next to it. Every needle is one vehicle going past.

I put a microphone on my roof

I put a microphone I had lying around from the pandemic on the pitched roof of our building, about 20 metres from the nearest road, and calibrated it against my phone. Every level in here is dB(A), decibels weighted to what a human ear actually hears, and every one of them is probably a bit lower than the truth.

Placeholder: the rest of the article lives on stoy.lekvam.no for now.