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It’s Friday night, and after a long work week you want to hit up a bar with your friends. You sidle into the booth and proceed to spend the next several hours yelling at each other from two feet away, just to be heard above the noise.

It’s a familiar story to Gregory Scott, the founder of the crowdsourced app SoundPrint. He has hearing loss himself, and came up with the idea after many dates out in New York City where the music was unbearably loud, even damaging to his ears. He began to measure venues with decibel meters and eventually translated that work into a smartphone app.

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The app, launched in 2018, allows users to search and rate public venues based on how quiet or loud they are. It has compiled curated ‘Quiet Lists’ of cities like New York and San Francisco. Toronto will the one of the first international lists, alongside London. Vancouver has seen significant usage from the app as well.

“You open up the app and press ‘begin’ for about 30 seconds,” said Scott. “It will tell you whether it will be conducive to conversation, and it will also tell you whether it will be a danger to hearing health.”