Development of metric models to predict annoyance due to tonal office noise

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To guide the design of a comfortable office environment, a proper understanding of people’s annoyance due to exposure to tonal office noise is valuable. The purpose of the research described in this paper is to develop models to relate sound metric values to people’s perceived annoyance level due to tonal office noise exposure. Thirty subjects with normal hearing participated in a multiple-part test in an office-like environment. Subjects were asked to rate sounds with different tone levels and tone frequencies, with and without a harmonic. The ambient broadband noise level was also varied. Two annoyance prediction models were developed to predict the average of the responses to each of the 222 sounds used in the test. Both models are functions of sound metrics related to level, tonalness, spectral balance, and low-frequency content. One model is potentially more useful when quantifying, for a particular environment, the increase in annoyance due to the presence of tones. The other model is more appropriate for comparing different office environments with varying levels of both broadband noise and tones. The performance of both models is examined by comparing their predictions with subjects’ averaged annoyance ratings from another test.