Psychoacoustic and noise annoyance of hard disk drive affects acoustic ergonomics and emotional wellness of consumers

Abstract

Human hearing is a complex system due to the highly nonlinear nature of human ears. The ears perform many tasks simultaneously from identifying sound direction, estimating a distance from a sound source, masking of sound, and evaluating the noise. The objective sound power measurement is unable to convince the subjective nature of sound evaluation. Psychoacoustic measures such as sharpness, roughness, loudness, and fluctuation strength begin to show importance in understanding the quality of the sound from small interior such as Hard Disk Drive (HDD), which present in the most mobile consumer laptop. Two sets of jury tests have been performed to quantify the degree of HDD noise annoyance with psychoacoustic on broader age groups. The results indicate that the psychoacoustic have a close relationship with the HDD noise annoyance and age groups. The effect of laptop HDD on the user's emotional perceptions of different sound events caused by HDD's shows some participants are feeling less calm, annoyed, and excited as compared to before the jury tests.