title: Android - Determine sound levels around phone
body: <p>I want to find out the level of noise around the phone. There doesn't seem to be an easy built-in way to do this, so I've found a few examples that say to use AudioRecord to listen for a brief time and then to use a formula to get the decibel. I have a few questions that the documentation doesn't seem much to explaining though and I was wondering if you kind folk could help me understand.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>What's captured in the Array? AudioRecord takes an several arguments on Channel type, format and sample rate and stores that information into an array. I can see the raw numbers, but what do they actually mean? </p></li>
  <li><p>Is there a resource that your could point me to, or explain to me, on how to convert(what I assume to be) the raw audio in byte form into a decibel representation?</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The part I don't understand is #1, what is actually put in the array. Any help would be appreciated. </p>