Why a diary written by hand fails
A barking dog is a hard thing to keep a diary about. It starts at twenty to two in the morning, you lie there deciding whether to get up, and by the time you have found a pen the entry says "around 2am, barking, ages". The officer reading that cannot tell whether it was four minutes or forty, and neither can you. Daytime is no better, because the barking happens while you are out, or on a work call, or simply not counting.
Officers see a lot of diaries and they know which ones were written at the time and which were filled in on Sunday from memory. Rounded times, missing nights and a complaint in every effect column all count against you, even when the noise is real.
A continuous recording does not have that problem. The times are exact to the second, the nights are all there, and nothing is reconstructed afterwards. The difficulty is that a week of audio is a hundred and sixty hours long and nobody can listen to it. That is the part Hush does.
What Hush finds in a recording
Software trained to recognise dog vocalisations listens to the whole recording in half second steps and marks every stretch where a dog is barking, howling or whining. Runs of barking are grouped into episodes, so a dog that barks on and off for twenty minutes is one entry, not two hundred.
For each episode you get:
- The start and end time, taken from the time you pressed record and the position in the file.
- How long it lasted and roughly how many barks there were.
- The pattern: on and off, sustained (a steady bark for a minute or more), or frantic (very fast barking, the kind that comes from distress or a dog left alone).
- How loud it was, in decibels, compared with the background level in your room just before it started.
- A short audio clip, so whoever reads the log can hear it rather than take your word for it.
The timeline shows the whole recording day by day with the night hours shaded, so a pattern of early morning barking is visible at a glance. The log puts the same episodes in the table layout councils use, with a column for you to add what effect each one had on you, and a report sets out how the recording was made and analysed so an officer can see the method.
The timeline
The noise log
| Date | Time | Noise | Pattern | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 Apr | 01:52 to 02:01 | Dog barking | Sustained | Woken, could not get back to sleep |
| 14 Apr | 09:27 to 09:41 | Dog barking | Frantic | Working from home, call interrupted |
| 14 Apr | 14:52 to 15:04 | Dog barking | Sustained | |
| 14 Apr | 20:14 to 20:20 | Dog barking | On and off |
What to record with, and where to put it
Any phone will do to start with. The voice recorder app that came with it will record for hours as long as the phone is plugged in and has space, and a night's recording is a few hundred megabytes. An old phone you no longer use is ideal, because it can be left in place for a week without being needed. A cheap dictaphone or a handheld recorder works just as well and has more storage.
Put it in the room where you hear the dog most, which is usually a bedroom, on a shelf or windowsill facing the side of the house the noise comes from. Leave the window as you normally have it at night, because the officer wants to know what you hear, not what the dog sounds like from the garden. Keep it off the floor and away from the television, the boiler and anything else that makes noise of its own. Do not put it in a drawer or under a pillow.
Write down the time you pressed record, to the minute. Hush uses that time to work out when each episode happened, so if it is wrong everything in the log is wrong by the same amount. The phone's clock is fine for this.
Record as long as you can. One night will show you what Hush finds. Two weeks is what most councils ask a diary to cover and is a good target, and you do not have to record it all at once; recordings can be added to the same case as you make them.
If you do not want a phone tied up for a fortnight, the Hush recorder is a mains powered unit that records for weeks and uploads itself. It is on request only at the moment; ask us about it.
What it costs
The first day of your recording is analysed free, so you can see what Hush finds in your own house before paying anything. Everything you have typed into your case stays yours whether you pay or not.
If it is your dog
Some people reach this page from the other side of the fence, after a complaint about their own dog. Hush works the same way for you. A week's recording from inside your own house, or a neighbour's with their agreement, shows exactly when the dog barks and for how long, which is the first thing you need to know to stop it, and an honest record is better than an argument if the complaint goes further.