The assessment of environmental pollution levels is a complex and expensive 
task that public administration and often also private entities are willing or 
forced to take over. Focusing on the assessment of environmental noise 
pollution in urban areas, we provide qualitative considerations and 
experimental results to show the feasibility of wireless sensor networks to be 
used in this context. We present a prototype for the collection and logging of 
noise pollution data based on the Tmote invent prototyping platform, using 
which we performed indoor and outdoor noise pollution measurements. We build 
upon these first experimental results to depict the potentials and limits of 
currently available wireless sensor networks prototyping platforms to be used 
as noise pollution sensors. Furthermore, we present tinyLAB, a Matlab-based 
tool developed in the context of this work, which enables real-time 
acquisition, processing and visualization of data collected in wireless sensor 
networks.