About Know Your Noise
The purpose of the Know Your Noise website is to provide accurate and meaningful information about noise exposure and its impact on your hearing health.
It’s a place where you can get personalised information that’s directly relevant to your own situation. You can find out whether your levels of noise exposure (at work and play) are putting you at risk of hearing damage, and you can take a hearing test to see how well you hear in a noisy background.
Know Your Noise has been created by the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL) and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health.
It is sponsored by the HEARing CRC’s HEARsmart, a new initiative which aims to bring about a cultural shift in how Australians think about their exposure to loud noise. HEARsmart aims to make a positive impact on Australians’ hearing health, change attitudes and behaviours towards harmful noise exposure, and reduce the prevalence of acquired hearing loss in Australia.
Much of the work behind Know Your Noise comes directly from NAL’s recent research into hearing health. NAL, the research division of Australian Hearing, is an internationally recognised leader in hearing research with expertise in many areas of hearing health, including noise measurement and hearing loss prevention.
With the support of the Office of Hearing Service’s Hearing Loss Prevention Program, NAL has conducted several large-scale investigations of hearing health in Australia and the results of that work form the basis of Know Your Noise. For example, the comparative data you see on the site is based on results from over 8,000 people who participated in our massive online survey in 2012, Soundcheck Australia.
We want to keep improving our data and maintaining its relevance, and so we invite all visitors to the Know Your Noise website to consider contributing their data to our dataset. This will help us build a more accurate picture of noise exposure in Australia and will bring us closer to our ultimate goal: a healthier hearing future for all Australians.