The white noise standard sample method and application for subjective noise evaluation

Abstract

The anchored scoring method is one of the widely used subjective sound evaluation methods. The comparability between subjective sound evaluation data obtained from different sample sets can be enhanced by selecting the standard sound sample as reference sample in subjective sound evaluation, thus facilitating the horizontal comparison between different evaluation results. However, the applicability of the standard sound sample method is poor in the experiments on evaluating some types of noise because the mechanisms of annoyance caused by different types of noise are discrepant. Therefore, the standard sound sample method for white noise that takes the existing pure tone as standard sample is proposed. Taking the evaluation results of the common anchored scoring method as benchmark, the experimental study of the performances of the standard sound sample method and the anchored scoring method was carried out according to the evaluation of the annoyance degrees of the two types of similar noise combination or dissimilar noise combination that have obviously different spectra and perceptual characteristics. The results show that the standard sound sample method for pure tone is suitable for noise with obvious tonal perception and that the standard sound sample method for white noise is suitable for broadband noise with weak tonal perception. Finally, the method of conversion between the annoyance evaluation results on different reference samples is studied to enhance the applicability of the standard sound sample method.