Subjective ratings of heavy-weight floor impact sounds in wood frame construction

Relation between annoyance and single-number quantities for rating heavy-weight floor impact sound insulation in wooden houses

“…Those studies found that the arithmetic average of octave-band sound pressure levels from 63 to 4 kHz band, and Zwicker's loudness level (ISO 532) is highly correlated with the perceived loudness of artificial stationary sounds stimulating the sounds transmitted through walls, including sounds with a dominant spectral component in the low-frequency range. The relation between L iFavg,Fmax and loudness (N 5 ) of stimuli used in the present study showed high correlation: greater than r ¼ 0.95; in the previous study by Ryu et al (2009), the correlation coefficient was also 0.91. These high correlation coefficients between both quantities show agreement with results of investigations of numerical relations between the arithmetic average of octave-band sound pressure levels from 63 to 4 kHz band and Zwicker's loudness level for sounds with broadband spectral components such as environmental noises, speech, and music (Tachibana et al, 1993;Ishibashi et al, 2006).…”

“…A previous study by the authors (Ryu et al, 2009) also revealed that L iFavg,Fmax is highly correlated with annoyance for sounds with various spectra over a wide sound level range (r ¼ 0.96) recorded in floors with various insulation treatments of a wooden frame mock-up building. Subsequently, analysis revealed that the correlation of loudness (N 5 ) with annoyance was also very high: r ¼ 0.94.…”

“…Height in the center position is 60 cm. Sound created by the impact ball dropped from 10 cm was found to produce a similar sound level to that of the jumping sound in an earlier study (Ryu et al, 2009) and was therefore used as the impact source with small impact force resembling the jumping sound used in this study. Floor impact sound pressure levels were calculated by the maximum sound pressure level with the time constant fast (JIS A 1418(JIS A -2, 2000ISO 140-11, 2005).…”

“…Several studies have suggested the equivalent A-weighted level (Owaki et al, 2000), the Zwicker loudness (Jeon et al, 2006), the Aweighted maximum level (Lee et al, 2009), and the arithmetic average of octave-band sound pressure levels (Ryu et al, 2009) as good quantitative indicators of noisiness or annoyance by heavy-weight floor impact sound in concrete or wooden structures. However, not all Japanese standardized quantities have been reported and compared with other quantities in earlier studies.…”

“…In addition, two studies (Jeon et al, 2006;Lee et al, 2009) used only a heavy-weight floor impact sound generated by an impact ball. A previous study (Ryu et al, 2009) by the authors used a sound with a spectrum of inverse A-weighting curve (IEC 61672-1, 2002) as a reference stimulus, which is unusual; in that heavy-weight floor impact sounds were measured in the field. The relative sound pressure level at 63 Hz to the higher frequency of the usual heavy-weight floor impact sound is much larger than that of the inverse A-weighting curve spectrum.…”