Effects of familiarity and likability on music masking of aircraft flyover noise for young people

Abstract

As typical and unique traffic noise, aircraft flyover noise is difficult to be effectively solved by traditional noise control treatments. For unsteady aircraft noise, music masking is considered to be a feasible method for subjective feeling improvement. This study aims to explore the effect of music likability and familiarity on the masking effect and analyze the relationships for young people. 15 music clips from six genres were firstly screened as masking sounds in terms of familiarity and likability difference. Two kinds of subjective scoring methods were adopted for total 60 participants to evaluate the annoyance reduction level. The correlation was analyzed and the masking effect prediction model was obtained from likability and familiarity. The results showed that the likability and familiarity had significant effects of masking effect. According to the annoyance reduction percentage, the masking effect had a significant positive correlation to likability. As for familiarity, there was a critical value for the best masking effect.