Comparison of procedures for the quantification of the impulsivity of environmental sounds

Abstract

Any procedure for the quantification of the impulsivity of environmental sounds should meet the following requirements: (i) sufficiently adequate in describing the human perception of impulsivity; (ii) easy to perform in the field by means of basic instrumentation or in the laboratory without requiring expensive apparatus and too much time. Among the several procedures proposed in the last decade, those more frequently used or promising have been considered in this paper and compared to one another. For this purpose data collected in earlier European studies have been reanalyzed. The data considered refer to 26 environmental sound stimuli heard in laboratory at 55 LAeq level for 20 s by a number of people varying between 48 and 112 subjects. The subjective data on clear perception of impulsivity have been related to the selected descriptors, such as LAI-LAS, increment, etc. The potential of these objective parameters in describing the perception of impulsivity, as well as the determination of the threshold value for the onset of impulsivity, has been investigated by means of their correlation with the subjective data and determination of sensitivity and peculiarity of each descriptor.