Jakarta – Indonesia has set up a new team to reduce noise from mosques, an official said on Thursday, as places of worship go into overdrive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

There are about 800,000 mosques in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, but residents living nearby have long complained that their speakers are too loud.

Places of worship become particularly active during Ramadan, which this year runs from mid-June to mid-July, when mosques blare out religious sermons even earlier than usual.

In an attempt to tackle the issue, Indonesia's vice-president, Jusuf Kalla, who also heads of an umbrella group for many of its mosques, has formed a team to sample the noise from mosque loudspeakers across the country, his spokesman Husain Abdullah said.

"The idea is for mosques to turn down the volume a little so that the sound can be heard only by residents in the immediate area," he said, adding that the aim was to have a "more harmonious, melodious sound coming from mosques".

He also said that mosques should ensure that the sounds they produced did not clash with other local noise. There was often a "loudspeaker war" between places of worship in the same area trying to outdo each other, he said.

The group, set up earlier this month, has already collected many samples and will send a report to the vice-president, who plans to sit down with Indonesia's top Muslim clerical body and Islamic organisations and discuss how to tackle the issue.

The group will complement a previous initiative, which saw about 100 teams of technicians deployed across the country to help fine-tune mosque loudspeakers and give advice on how best to arrange them to reduce noise.

Abdullah acknowledged that regulating the country's noisy mosques would be difficult and called on the Indonesian Council of Ulema to issue a fatwa on the issue.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/25/indonesia-bids-to-muffle-noisy-mosques