Abstract
The influence of fluctuating road traffic noise on perceived disturbance during a reading task as well as on performance, inside a living room with closed windows, is presented in this paper. Sixteen 2-min sound sequences were created combining two variables: the number of events (four levels varying from one to four car pass-bys) and the peak emergence above the background noise (four levels with a 5 dB(A) step) keeping limited variations ofLAmax, 1s. The noise impact was evaluated through a reading task of texts synchronized with the sound sequences, for participants classified into fast or slow readers, and sensitive or non-sensitive to noise. The comprehension rate of the texts decreases as the background sound level increases. The reading speed decreases during the rising front of a peak, and goes back to its former regular reading speed during the descending front of the peak. This slowdown during the rising front reaches 14% for slow readers. The declared disturbance is higher for slow readers compared to fast readers, and higher for noise sensitive persons compared to non-sensitive persons. The influence of the acoustic indicators on the reading disturbance is very small compared to the influence of personal factors. There is even no influence of the number of events on this disturbance.
Highlights
Environmental noise is recognized as one of the most important nuisances for citizens
Even if aircraft noise is more annoying than road traffic noise for the same noise level [2], road traffic is cited by a majority of people as the most annoying noise source, since a large number of citizens are more exposed to road traffic noise than aircraft noise [3]
For the (RF) and (DF) categories, as the noise levels should exceed LAmax – 10 dB(A) for at least 50% of the reading duration, the maximum duration for these two categories is twice the event duration which corresponds to 9600 ms (2 Â 4800)
Summary
Environmental noise is recognized as one of the most important nuisances for citizens. Sleep disturbance and annoyance mostly relate to road traffic noise. As a consequence, when the particular sounds are repeated during long periods, noise annoyance has a very individual dimension, and a large part of it can be explained by extra-auditory factors [19]. Personal factors such as sensitivity to noise and situational factors such as the coping strategies an individual may develop when exposed to noise or the ability to mentally fade out the.
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