Auralization of sound insulation in buildings

Abstract

In various surveys, it was found that people living in multi-family dwellings and apartment houses are annoyed by noise of their neighbors. Also, it seems that building regulations, for example, the German standard DIN 4109 “Sound insulation in buildings,” are insufficient. The degree of annoyance is influenced by the personal conditions of the habitants (stress), the value of the dwelling and the duration the habitants live there. The effects on humans include disturbance of conversation or listening to the TV or radio in private dwellings as well as communication in office premises, reduced power of concentration during physical or mental work, and disturbance of sleep. All this strongly depends on the kind of noise signal (speech, music, footfall, etc.) and on the context, and thus, it is highly doubtful if single-number quantities such as the STL sufficiently describe the real situation. In this paper, a technique is presented for auralization of complex virtual acoustic scenes including airborne and structure-borne noise in buildings with particular respect to sound propagation across or between coupled rooms. Based on SEA-like sound propagation models in standardized prediction methods (EN 12354), algorithms are designed for FIR filtering of audio signals and applied in listening tests and for to creation of audio demos. The auralized sounds can be used during building design processes, in studies of human noise perception, and in development of new metrics for future building codes.