How loud would a million dogs barking be?

So a friend of mine who’s a reference librarian (and has a gaming YouTube channel you should check out) recently got an interesting question: how loud would a million dogs barking be?

Adam Benno French Hounds
Alright now, all together on the count of three… are you even listening? 
This is an interesting question because it gets at some interesting properties of how sound work, in particular the decibel scale.

So, first off, we need to establish our baseline. The loudest recorded dog bark clocked in at 113.1 dB, and was produced by a golden retriever named Charlie. (Interestingly, the loudest recorded human scream was 129 dB, so it looks like Charlie’s got some training to do to catch up!) That’s louder than a chain saw, and loud enough to cause hearing damage if you heard it consonantly.

Now, let’s scale our problem down a bit and figure out how loud it would be if ten Charlies barked together. (I’m going to use copies of Charlie and assume they’ll bark in phase becuase it makes the math simpler.) One Charlie is 113 dB, so your first instinct may be to multiply that by ten and end up 1130 dB. Unfortunately, if you took this approach you’d be (if you’ll excuse the expression) barking up the wrong tree. Why? Because the dB scale is logarithmic. This means that a 1130 dB is absolutely ridiculously loud. For reference, under normal conditions the loudest possible sound (on Earth) is 194 dB.  A sound of 1000 dB would be loud enough to create a black hole larger than the galaxy. We wouldn’t be able to get a bark that loud even if we covered every inch of earth with clones of champion barker Charlie.

Ok, so we know what one wrong approach is, but what’s the right one? Well, we have our base bark at 113 dB. If we want a bark that is one million times as powerful (assuming that we can get a million dogs to bark as one) then we need to take the base ten log of one million and multiply it by ten (that’s the deci part of decibel). (If you want more math try this site.) The base ten log of one million is six, so times ten that’s sixty decibels. But it’s sixty decibels louder than our original sound of 113dB, for a grand total of 173dB.

Now, to put this in perspective, that’s still pretty durn loud. That’s loud enough to cause hearing loss in our puppies and everyone in hearing distance. We’re talking about the loudness of a cannon, or a rocket launch from 100 meters away. So, yes, very loud, but not quite “destroying the galaxy” loud.

A final note: since the current world record for loudest barking group of dogs is a more modest 124 dB from group of just 76 dogs, if you could get a million dogs to bark in unison you’d definitely set a new world record! But, considering that you’d end up hurting the dogs’ hearing (and having to scoop all that poop) I’m afraid I really can’t recommend it.

Can a computer write my blog posts?



Bios robotlab writing robot

  • 1 R script to tidy up the text
  • 1 Python script to train a Markov Chain  text generator

A Markov Whatnow?



  • Input: The dog ate the apple.
  • Possible outputs:
    • The apple.
    • The dog ate the apple.
    • The dog ate the dog ate the apple.


  3. Finally, use the model to generate text.


First try:



  • Short answer: they’re all correct
  • And those speakers are aware of
  • The Job Market for Linguistics PhDsWhat do you much


