Noise exposure causes many adverse effects on health, including auditory alterations, nonauditory physiological effects, and psycho-social consequences. The extent of each effect depends, among other factors, on the frequency content of the acoustic stimulus. This work analyzes the sound frequencies capable of inducing each one of the effects of noise on humans. The main goal was to evaluate the efficiency of the A-weighting network from the point of view of health. In this direction, an extensive bibliographic review about the effects of noise on people and the frequencies that eventually cause the effects were carried out. The results have shown that some serious effects on health of high noise levels are due to the low-frequency range. Consequently, it is expected that the A-weighting network would not be adequate for evaluating the global effect of noise on humans, in particular when the noise has very high emission levels. It is recommended to measure and to save the third-octave-band noise spectrum or even to record the sound signal without any compression or alteration. It allows a better understanding of the cause-effect relationship and the possibility to apply other frequency weighting networks in the future.
A Bachelor of Science in Sound Engineering of five years was created at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina in the year 2007. The first course of the specialty that students should take is Introduction to Acoustics and Psychoacoustics. It has a four month duration, is located in freshman year, and does not require any previous course of math or physics. The course intention is to give beginners a global point of view of acoustics and its branches, the nature of sound, some elementary concepts of acoustics, and the basic methodological directions to elaborate academic projects on acoustics. As a very early stage training in scientific method and project development, the undergraduates have to choose a topic to perform a project during the semester. At the middle of the course, the pupils ought to consign a project progress report. At the end of the course, they submit the final report and give an oral presentation to their classmates. This work expounds the empirical work in class and summarizes some student projects carried out during the courses taught between years 2007 and 2010.
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