Airborne sound insulation as a measure for noise annoyance

Abstract

There is currently a lack of measure to describe airborne sound insulation in terms of subjective evaluation of noise annoyance. With a given sound insulation value, different kinds of sound signals could produce rather different hearing sensation levels. Physical noise measurements to describe airborne sound insulation often cannot solve problems in terms of noise annoyance, and psychoacoustic metrics are increasingly used. Recently, new results of evaluating sound insulation spectra by single-numbers have been adapted for practical applications such as in ISO 16717-1. In this paper, comparisons are carried out to demonstrate how single-number ratings are affected by non-steady-state sounds. The effect of a sound insulation having a frequency dip of 6 dB has also been examined. It is well known that noises with tonal components could be rather annoying, so that it would be of significance to examine if a frequency depending sound insulation can act as a filter for tonal components. In this paper, it will be shown that psychoacoustic magnitudes like loudness, sharpness, and fluctuation strength can largely account for different aspects, especially if airborne sound insulation is supposed to describe hearing sensation.