Psychoacoustical Study for Sound Quality Index of Steady State Noise of Refrigerators

Abstract

Household refrigerator radiates noise of which the pattern is dependent on the operating condition of its parts, such as compressor, flow fans, etc. Thus the refrigerator noise has a variety of frequency characteristics. Therefore, it is required to consider the noise characteristics for evaluating the noise quality and eventually developing the sound quality index of the refrigerator noise. In this study, five units of household refrigerator were selected to measure their noises that were used to generate sound sources for jury test of the study. The measured noises of five refrigerators were divided into ten kinds of sound source by considering operating condition and frequency characteristics.Additionally, the ten sources were each edited to have the same SPL of 30 dBA. Totally twenty kinds of sound sources (10-original SPL, 10-edited SPL 30 dBA) were evaluated by twenty-two subjects, and compared with their sound quality metrics. It was found that only the loudness of the metrics was meaningfully correlated with the subjective evaluation. The rests, sharpness, roughness and fluctuation strength, were not related. The conclusion of this study is that a new sophisticated index is necessary to be developed to qualitatively evaluate the household refrigerator noise.