• Mauricio Fuentes Alburquenque, Antonio Marzzano Ríos, Mauricio Canals Lambarri, Rodrigo Torres Arellano, Dante Cáceres Lillo, and Sergio Alvarado Orellana.
• Escuela de Salud Pública, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
• Rev Med Chil. 2020 May 1; 148 (5): 582-593.

BackgroundEnvironmental noise can cause auditory and non-auditory adverse effects.AimTo identify daily environmental noise patterns in two urban sites of Metropolitan Santiago.Material And MethodsContinuous measurements of environmental noise in two sites of Metropolitan Santiago were analyzed by means of hierarchical cluster analysis. One site was a main street with heavy traffic and the second was a street from a neighborhood with intense nocturnal activity. The first phase of analysis consisted of clustering noise profiles with similar shapes according to the average linkage method, with correlation as the similarity measure. The second phase grouped the profiles with similar shapes into sub-clusters that also had similar absolute noise levels, using the complete linkage method, with absolute distance as the similarity measure.ResultsTwo noise patterns were identified for the first site, one for weekdays (Monday to Friday) and another for weekends (Saturday and Sunday). For the second site five different patterns were identified (Monday to Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). Also different patterns appeared for summer compared to the rest of the year. The noise levels of both sites were high.ConclusionsThe detected noise levels can be annoying, cause sleep disturbances and increase the risk for hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, among other effects.

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