Peak Pressure Levels Research Articles

An Automatic Data Reduction System

The problems involved in manually reducing acoustical data obtained on extensive field noise surveys make this phase of the job an exceedingly tedious one. Instrumentation has been developed to perform the reduction techniques automatically from tape-recorded field data. Once the correction numbers for the recording system have been inserted, the system will plot a narrow band analysis, a 13 octave band analysis, or an octave band analysis of a sample of the noise. The ordinate may be either peak pressure level, rms pressure level, or average pressure level. Facilities have been provided for taking samples from several points (such as the equal area points on a grid) and averaging the squares of the pressures, thus yielding an average intensity over the grid. For the case where the areas are not equal, weighting functions may be introduced.