A discussion on the origin and treatment of noise in industrial environments - II. Social effects of noise Noise and the householder

Abstract

To the householder, noise is important mainly in respect of its capacity to annoy. Rarely in residential noise problems arising from industry are we concerned with levels which are sufficiently high to interfere with communication or to cause deafness. It is this fact that makes assessment of the intrusive value of industrial noise extremely difficult. One can make objective measurements of hearing loss, or of interference with communication, but one cannot describe, in objective terms, the emotional reactions to noise of people enjoying the privacy of their homes. The problem, therefore, is to decide how we can express the intrusive propensities of a noise in terms of its physically describable characteristics. It might be argued that previous experience is the real guide that is, a survey of noises which people have found to be acceptable in the past, which can be used to predict reaction in new cases. This is, in fact, the basis of criteria of acceptability as assessed by such methods as those currently proposed by the Wilson Committee on the Problem of Noise (1963), and the International Standards Organization; and, indeed, one finds that for noise from traffic, aircraft, and (apart from some extreme examples) noise from