Madrid, Spain ? Visitors to Madrid have much to marvel over: splendid architecture, sizzling nightlife, great food and people who scream at one another.

Madrid’s city hall, itself blamed for much of the racket in this city of 3 million and facing elections next spring, has launched a blitz to encourage quiet.

“SSSHHH. Control your noise” as the campaign is called, started Sept. 13 and is due to last through the end of 2003.

Fingers raised to their lips, a dozen blue-clad mime artists have begun to roam bustling streets with a choreographed skit urging children and adults to speak softly. Two city landmarks, the statues of Cibeles and Neptune, appear in posters with the same hushed pose.

City hall says a planned Web page will offer these and other hints for making Madrid acoustically gentler: wear slippers around the house, refrain from slamming doors and don’t remodel your apartment at night.

Placido Perera, head of noise at the city’s environmental protection unit, insisted that reminding grown-ups not to yell isn’t insulting.

“There are a lot of things that are just common sense, but which people don’t embrace as such,” he said.

Perera, whose first name means placid, said that after 30 years of studying noise he’s concluded Madrid is indeed loud, although probably no worse than other major European cities.

The noisiest of 23 spots in Madrid that are monitored nonstop Paseo de Recoletos, a downtown thoroughfare peaks at about 71 decibels, he said. Noise becomes potentially hazardous to people’s hearing at about 80-85 decibels.

What sets Madrid apart, Perera said, is that residents whining about noise often have themselves to blame. The campaign aims to curb things like speaking in bellows, honking a split second after a traffic light turns green and vociferous late-night carousing along narrow streets.

A busy Spanish coffee shop at breakfast-time serves up another prime example of the national din: diners struggle to be heard as plates rattle, the television blares and coin-spitting slot machines bleep and whir.

Perera says Spain is an example of a Mediterranean culture in which nice weather leads people to spend lots of time outdoors, on the street, where louder discourse is a necessity. The problem is they take those decibels back home with them, or to the office.

In Madrid, of course not all the noise is human. People are so weary from seemingly endless road work and construction under Mayor Jose Maria Alvarez del Manzano and the drone of jackhammers and bulldozers that one joke says Madrid will be a great city when it’s finished.

In one downtown district people have hung banners over their balconies proclaiming themselves victims of acoustic contamination.

But Perera denied suggestions that city hall is trying to shift blame for the city’s noise problems to the people who put up with them. “We’re not passing the buck to anyone,” he said.