The noise caused by wind farms can make some people ill, according to experts.

Research investigating the extent to which noise from small wind turbines can be heard in our towns and how this affects those living close to small wind systems has found that people with negative attitudes to turbines are more likely to perceive them as being noisy.

A man who kept 23 dogs at his home in Oxfordshire has been prosecuted for failing to comply with a Noise Abatement Notice to stop them barking.

While we wait for Noise Action Plans for England to be finalised, campaigners at Heathrow have released a report outlining practical measures which could reduce aircraft noise for those living under the airport's flight path.

The Singing Road in Lancaster, California. The road is made to 'sing' by placing spaced narrow ridges on the road at the right intervals so that as a car runs over them at the right speed, the road....'sings'.

A core part of our business at Dragonfly Acoustics is noise assessments in support of planning applications. In the majority of cases these devlopments are now on brownfield sites, often in built up or urban areas.

When undertaking an assessment in support of an application for a residential development in these areas, as for any noise assessment in support of a planning application, we follow the guidance in Planning Policy Guidance 24: Planning and Noise often referred to as PPG24.

As part of an assessment PPG24 requires we ‘categorise’ a site according to the daytime and night time ambient noise levels. These 4 categories ranging from A to D encompass the whole range of sites with ‘A’ indicating noise is not an issue on a site and ‘D’ indicating that “Planning permission should normally be refused”.

It is not unusual for the majority of town and city centre Brownfield Development sites to fall into PPG24 categories C and D, which broadly guides that development of these sites should be prohibited or at best avoided where possible. Our clients often ask us “what does this mean for our site”.

In this article we explain the implications and how we at Dragonfly Acoustics deal with this important issue for our clients

Well done to our three intrepid rowers who took part in Sunday's 2010 York Rotary Dragon Boat Challenge....