The characteristics of audible sound that concern us in this context are volume (decibels); pitch (kiloherz) and timbre or texture of sound. Online retailers like Amazon make a small fortune from selling us measuring gadgets that we imagine will fill a niche in our lives rather than occupy space in a drawer from one year to the next. Spare a thought for easy to use and often free online resources, such as the free to use Firefox plugin collection and in particular, Loori’s sound meter, which can be downloaded and used offline in your Firefox web browser. There is also webbrowsertools.com or Youlean’s high-end applications for sound professionals.
You may be able to gather quite an extensive array of data, particularly if your computer can convert what you see on your screen into a video file. If you do a sound check, you would want to hit 60 to 80 decibels. Other things are nice to know, but 60 to 80 decibels is a figure I retained from an earlier meeting.