A model for the perception of environmental sound based on notice-events

Abstract

An approach is proposed to shed light on the mechanisms underlying human perception of environmental sound that intrudes in everyday living. Most research on exposure-effect relationships aims at relating overall effects to overall exposure indicators in an epidemiological fashion, without including available knowledge on the possible underlying mechanisms. Here, it is proposed to start from available knowledge on audition and perception to construct a computational framework for the effect of environmental sound on individuals. Obviously, at the individual level additional mechanisms (inter-sensory, attentional, cognitive, emotional) play a role in the perception of environmental sound. As a first step, current knowledge is made explicit by building a model mimicking some aspects of human auditory perception. This model is grounded in the hypothesis that long-term perception of environmental sound is determined primarily by short notice-events. The applicability of the notice-event model is illustrated by simulating a synthetic population exposed to typical Flemish environmental noise. From these simulation results, it is demonstrated that the notice-event model is able to mimic the differences between the annoyance caused by road traffic noise exposure and railway traffic noise exposure that are also observed empirically in other studies and thus could provide an explanation for these differences.

Annoyance, detection and recognition of wind turbine noise

“…In case of local road traffic noise, variation in level over time is much stronger. At the low noise levels considered in the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 21 experiment, noticing is strongly related to annoyance (De Coensel et al, 2009) and hence the higher peak levels in the local road traffic may explain this.…”

“…Especially in this exposure regime noticing the sound is an important prerequisite for annoyance (De Coensel et al, 2009) The plasticity and diversity of the human auditory system may even lay a physiological basis for these inter-individual differences. To investigate this, results of experiments on informational and energetic masking will be combined (detection and recognition).…”

Ten questions on the soundscapes of the built environment

“…Therefore, an important step in mapping soundscape is mapping the sounds that users of the space are likely to notice. A sound's capability to attract attention depends on its characteristics, such as changes in time and frequency, often referred to as its saliency (De Coensel, Botteldooren, De Muer, Berglund, Nilsson, & Lercher, 2009). A sound's capability to receive attention and to get noticed also depends on the activity of the person.…”

Reduction of Wind Turbine Noise Annoyance: An Operational Approach

“…Furthermore, these noise parameters might also influence the perceived annoyance; more pronounced fluctuations increase noticeability and possibly annoyance whereas higher background levels might have the opposite effect due to informational masking [8,27].…”