Abstract
There is a large amount of evidence to suggest that people’s reactions to annoying sounds are moderated by the presence of other background sounds. One of the mechanisms of this moderation is auditory masking: when the annoying sound simply cannot be heard over the background. This presentation outlines a construction for computing a predictor of annoyance in the presence of masking. The construction is demonstrated by producing an augmentation of the common sound exposure level noise metric using one-third octave band data sampled at 2 Hz. These data allow an estimation of the probability of masking within each band at each time step. The acoustic energy within a masked band can be ‘discounted’ by this estimation before being summed in the usual equal-energy way and with the typical A-weighting corrections. In this way, backgrounds that only provide partial masking in frequency and time will produce predictions of annoyance that fall between the unmasked sound exposure value and negative infinity (the result if there was a certainty of complete masking). The application of this concept to the noise of multirotor air vehicles is discussed.
Published Version
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