Subjective and Objective Rating of Airborne Sound Insulation – Living Sounds

Perceived Loudness of Neighbour Sounds Heard Through Heavy and Light-Weight Walls with Equal <I>R</I><SUB>w</SUB> + <I>C</I><SUB>50</SUB><SUB>–</SUB><SUB>5000</SUB>

“…The behaviour at frequencies lower than 100 Hz explains why these two walls have the same Rw+C50−5000 value and indicate an overestimation of these frequencies in weighting. Findings in the study of Hongisto [21] regarding a music stimulus with traffic noise spectrum of ISO 717-1 confirm our result, since in that study the Rw + C50−5000 rating for the mentioned stimulus with strong bass sound was among the best 4 investigated single number quantity (SNQ) predictors (Rw + C100−3150, Rw + C100−5000, Rw + C50−3150 and Rw + C50−5000) of loudness. Interestingly, in the field study of the AkuLite project different findings were reported for impact sounds [42].…”

“…Although our results are based only on one SNQ (Rw + C50−5000), they are consistent with the ones in references [21,32]. Mortensen et al [11] had different findings, which can be explained by their use of very high sound pressure levels (110 dBA), which are typical for situations of e.g.…”

“…The majority of studies done with respect to the perception of sound insulation considered only spectral information of stimuli [11,19,21,24,26,27], also in cases when not only loudness but also disturbance or annoyance was addressed. Nevertheless, the temporal aspects of neighbours' noise should be also addressed in future studies, as people are very sensitive to temporal amplitude modulations [44].…”

“…The discussed revision of the method to characterise sound insulation properties of building elements and buildings is not only intended to lead to a simplification by minimizing the existing large number of single number quantities, but it has also been suggested to take the extended frequency range between 50 Hz and 100 Hz into account by default, rather than only as an option. Several researchers have therefore been working on the development of suitable measuring [12,13,14] and prediction methods [15,16,17,18], others have focused on the subjective assessment of sound insulation and on ways to perform listening tests [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27].…”

“…Three psychoacoustic methods were compared and it was also suggested that in order to obtain reliable results a wider variety of stimuli is necessary. Recent studies on single number ratings were performed by Hongisto et al [21] and Bailhache et al [27]. In the study of Hongisto et al, correlations of twelve standardized single-number quantities with subjective perception were investigated.…”