Pete, i'm open to other solutions, as I'm only a week into this Arduino business and have super nascent ideas about what is (and isn't) possible.
What I'm trying to do is read a rooms noise, smoothed over some time (say a 5 minute average), and have the sound level dB normalized (can be buckets really: 0-10, 10-20...70dB+) so that they direct a linear actuator to extend or contract such that its position matches to the corresponding noise level.
Thanks