Judged acceptability of noise exposure during television viewing

Abstract

Noise masking of television audio signals by flyovers is the most frequently mentioned problem of airport neighbors. This problem was studied in the laboratory using artificial noise. Three studies varied the intensity, duration, and rate (noises per hour) of the noises. Acceptability was found to approximate a logarithmic function of noise energy for changes in intensity, duration, and rate. Thus, the equal-energy principle, which has been generally observed in abstract psychometric experiments, was confirmed in this more realistic and representative task. A fourth study showed aircraft-flyover recordings to be more acceptable than artificial noises even though they had equivalent peak levels and masking durations. This difference can also be explained by the equal-energy principle, since the flyovers had lower average (or integrated) energy.

Effects of time-varying noise on annoyance :

“…The data obtained by Langdon, et al [37] for the subjects in Group 1 in the study reported previously and the data of Rice [27,39] at first may appear to be discordant. However, in the Langdon, et al study, in only one instance was the aircraft traffic volume below 15 flyovers per hour.…”

“…Moreover, both NPL and TNI only account for the range of variations in noise levels with time, but omit other temporal parameters such as the repetition rate of discrete noise events or the rate of change of levels with time -factors that may be important. While no direct evidence from social survey data has shown that these factors have major effects on human response to noise, laboratory studies of the adverse response to multiple events indicate 13 that these factors can affect the adverse human response to noise [27,37,44]. Details of these laboratory studies are given in section 3 of the present report .…”

“…In this study, subjects were exposed to three different volumes of truck traffic (i.e., 6, 50, and 186 trucks/two hours), presented at a constant L^q of 60 dB. Results of this phase of the study Indicate that as the number of trucks increased, the percentage of subjects annoyed decreased (53,37, and 20 percent annoyed). Given the non-monotonic relationship between the number of trucks present in traffic and annoyance found in the first part of this study, and the few and widely spaced values for the number of trucks used in the second part of the Ry lander, et al [AO] study, the relationship between the number of trucks and annoyance for this relatively long noise exposure cannot be adequately assessed.…”

“…In a study exploring the effects of level, duration, and number of events, Langdon, Gabriel, and Creamer [37] exposed subjects to simulated aircraft flyovers while the subjects watched television. After each half-hour session the subjects rated the acceptability of the flyovers.…”

“…However, several factors could contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between annoyance and noise. These include defining the dose-response relationship between annoyance and the number of discrete noise events [27,37,39,40], determining the effect of background noises on the response to the overall noise environment [10,33,42,[58][59][60], indicating the role of the activity of the respondent as a modulator of annoyance [3,4,6,8,9,13,[23][24][25]45,49,50,55,61], and determining the dose-response relationship between annoyance and the rate and amount of fluctuation in noise level [20,21,27,39,[43][44][45][54][55][56][57]. Research that increases the knowledge about any of these topics could improve the ability to predict adverse response from physical measurements of time-varying noise.…”