Approaches to address response variations in psychoacoustic tests focused on the assessment of tonal office noise

Abstract

Tonal noise from information technology and service equipment is known to be a problem. A proper understanding of the annoyance due to tonal noise is valuable for guiding the design of a comfortable office environment. Earlier, authors have proposed and validated two types of annoyance metric models based on the psychoacoustic subjective tests conducted in an office mock-up, and further developed software to implement the models. Here, the focus is on analyzing the response variations observed in the tests: i.e., the tendency for subjects to give relative annoyance ratings instead of absolute ratings and differences in responses to longer and shorter stimuli. In addition, the approaches to incorporating response variations into the metric models are described. Note that the presented work is based on the studies of tonal office noises from service equipment, with the fundamental frequencies of interest being 29.5, 60, 120, 240, 500, 750, and 1000 Hz. However, the proposed approaches for evaluating tonalness and addressing response variations may be applicable to the study of tonal noises from information technology equipment.