Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ on Nostr: When we talk about sound being loud or quiet in terms of decibels, that's another ...

When we talk about sound being loud or quiet in terms of decibels, that's another example of referencing off some fixed quantity; there, a measurement of the quietest sound most people can hear. A sound that's 90 dB loud is then 10^(90 / 10) = 10⁹ = a billion times as loud as that reference sound.

Strictly speaking, we might should write dBI to indicate that there's an intensity reference, but in practice no one does that — confusingly, the reference is just left off for sound intensity.