Noise annoyance and its measurement

Słyszenie w środowisku
Wykład VII
Anna Preis, email:
apraton@amu.edu.pl
24.04.2013

How to test if soundscape changes into noisescape?
Noise annoyance and its measurement
Anna Preis
apraton@amu.edu.pl

Landscapes

Soundscape

Soundscape
The Tuning of the World formalized the soundscape terminology Schafer had devised
during his field studies with the WSP:
Background sounds he defined as “keynotes” (in analogy to music where a keynote
identifies the fundamental tonality of a composition around which the music
modulates);
Foreground sounds (intended to attract attention) are termed “sound signals.”
Sounds that are particularly regarded by a community and its visitors are called
“soundmarks”—in analogy to landmarks.
Natural examples of the latter include geysers, waterfalls and wind traps while
cultural examples include distinctive bells and the sounds of traditional activities.
(Schafer 1977a: 9, 55-56, 173-175, 272-275; Truax 1978: 68, 119, 127; 1984: 22,
58-60).
K. Wrightson, (2000) An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology.The Journal of Acoustic
Ecology, 1(1).
Soundscape exists through human perception of the acoustic environment
A. L. Brown (2010) Soundscapes and environmental noise management Noise
Control Eng. J., 58(5)

Understanding urban and natural soundscapes
• Dick Botteldooren, Department of Information Technology, Ghent University, Gent,
Belgium.
• Catherine Lavandier, Laboratory MRTE, University of Cergy Pontoise, F-95000
Cergy Pontoise, France
• Anna Preis, Institute of Acoustics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
• Daniele Dubois, Institut Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Equipe LAM, CNRS, France,
INCAS3, Assen, The Netherlands.
• Itziar Aspuru, Labein-Tecnalia, Environmental Unit, Spain
• Catherine Guastavino, McGill University, School of Information Studies and
CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Music, Media and Technology),
Montréal, QC, Canada.
• Lex Brown, Griffith School of Environment, Griffith University, Nathan 4111,
Australia
• Mats Nilsson, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Tjeerd C. Andringa, Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen, The
Netherlands. INCAS3, Assen, TheNetherlands.
Working Group 1 of the COST action
“Soundscapes of European cities and
landscapes”

Professor Lex Brown, Griffith University, Australia
Noise Control
Approach
Sound as waste
Concerns sound of discomfort
Human response related to
level of sound
Measures by integrating across
all sound sources
Manages by reducing level
Soundscape Approach
Sound as resource
Concerns sounds of preference
Preference often unrelated to
level - quiet not the objective
Requires differentiation
between sound sources –
wanted sound from unwanted
sound
Manages by “wanted sounds”
masking “unwanted sounds”

Sound environment versus noise environment
Soundscape
• Perception and recognition of
different sound sources in the
environment
• Soundscape perception: auditory
scene analysis based on streams
segregation
• Criteria of segregation: loudness,
pitch, timbre, location
• Scaling the preferences of
different soundscapes
Noisescape
• Occurrence of noise which disturbs
perception to such a degree that it is
impossible to recognize sound sources in
the environment
• Noisescape as a source of disturbance of
human activity such as communication,
work, studying
• Noisescape threshold: degree of
disturbance which makes the
performance of a given activity
ineffective
• Speech intelligibility in noise is well
defined and could be a measure of noise
annoyance related to communication
activity

Disturbed landscape

Disturbed soundscape = noisecape
White noise
Specific noise

Noise annoyance
Traditional approach
• L DEN one noise index
• Noise maps for different sound
sources
• Standardized method of noise
annoyance scaling
• Noise parameter is scaled
• Annoyance is related to noise
parameter
• (Dose –response characteristics
%HA versus L DEN )
Noisescape approach
• Difficulty in performing a
given activity disturbed by
noise is scaled
• The degree of difficulty in
performing a given activity is
a measure of noise
annoyance assessment
• Noise annoyance assessment
depends on the degree of
disturbance in the human
activity

Traditional approach: noise annoyance in rest
• ISO/TS 15660:2003, recommended by ICBEN
• verbal rating scale: Thinking about the last (...12 months or so),when
you are here at home, how much does noise from (….noise source...)
bother, disturb, or annoy you?
• (1) Not at all? (2) Slightly? (3) Moderately? (4) Very? (5) Extremely?
• numerical rating scale: Thinking about the last (...12 months or
so),what number from zero to ten best shows how much you are
bothered, disturbed, or annoyed by the presented noise events?
• If you are not at all annoyed choose zero, if you are extremely
annoyed choose ten, if you are somewhere in between, choose a
number between zero and ten.
Preis, A., Kaczmarek, T., Wojciechowska, H., Żera, J., Fields, J.M. (2003), "Polish version of the standardized noise
reaction questions for the community noise surveys," International Journal of Medicine and environmental Health
16(2): 155-159

Noise annoyance related to rest and
communication activity
• Noise disturbs
rest
• Noise disturbs
communication activity
traditional scaling of
noise annoyance (ISO/TS
15660:2003,
recommended by ICBEN)
verbal rating scale
numerical rating scale
difficulty of comprehending
speech in noise is a
measure of noise
annoyance
speech intelligibility score

Noise annoyance scale related to noise parameters
sound
parameters of
sound increase
L, S, R, F
different models
of noise annoyance
unwanted sound
= NOISE
Noise annoyance scale related to communication - speech intelligibility scores
work
work
disturbance
Noisescape- measure of work
disturbance
soundscape
noise
communication
communication
disturbance
Noisescape-measure of
communication disturbance
Speech
intelligibility in
noise
rest
rest
disturbance
Noisescape- measure of rest
disturbance

Rest
Noise annoyance scaling

Noise annoyance scaling
Communication activity

Noisescape related to the communication activity
Equal difficulty in speech recognition
Equal annoyance rating
SRT ---- 50% speech recognition
Averaged speech reception thresholds for nine
environmental noises expressed as an arithmetical
means and 95% of coincidence interval.
The measure of difficulty of speech comprehension
for nine noises expressed as medians and their
interquartile ranges.
A. Preis, H. Hafke-Dys, T. Kaczmarek, T. Gjestland (2011) The relationship between speech reception thresholds and the
assessment of annoyance caused by different environmental noises Noise Control Eng. J. 59 (4), 408-414.

One point relationship between noise annoyance
and speech intelligibility
Difficulty in speech
comprehension
annoyance related to
communication activity
Speech intelligibility
What about the other points?

The relationship between speech intelligibility and
the assessment of annoyance caused by
environmental noises
Anna Preis, Honorata Hafke-Dys, Tomasz Kaczmarek
Institute of Acoustics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
Truls Gjestland
SINTEF ICT, Trondheim, Norway

Aim of the study
To find out if the speech intelligibility in noise can be
used as the annoyance measure of this noise
To assess the difficulty in speech comprehension in
noise
• Aniansson, G., Bjὂrkman, M., “Traffic noise annoyance and speech intelligibility in persons with normal
and person with impaired hearing” Journal of Sound and Vibration 88(1), 99-106, (1983).
• Ellis L.W, Pakulski L., “Judgments of speech intelligibility and speech annoyance by mothers of children
who are deaf or hard of hearing” Perceptual and motor skills 96, 324-8, (2003).

Noise L AeqT (dB) SRT (dB)
Bus_in 83.5 -28.6
Tram_1_in 76.5 -23.4
Train_out 75.0 -20.4
Tram_out 73.9 -15.1
Street 73.8 -13.0
School_in 73.5 -10.0
Plane_out 71.8 -9.8
Babble noise 68.2 -7.7
50% speech intelligibility
Speech level was 65dB and noise level was respectively -6, -4, -2,
0=SRT, 2, 4, 6. Each subject was presented with his SRT from the
previous experiment

Experiments
Experiment I:
part 1: speech intelligibility was measured for eight
environmental noises at seven signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).
part 2: for these SNR values, the participants assessed the
difficulty in speech comprehension
Experiment II:
the standard method of noise annoyance assessment was used
to the same noises as in Experiment I
Participants
nineteen university students, 8 males and 11 females aged
between 20 and 25, took part in both psychoacoustic
experiments

Are they equal or not?
Annoyance related to
communication activity
• difficulty in speech
comprehension
Annoyance related to
the rest
• traditional noise annoyance
assessment
speech communication
rest?
Experiment 1 part 2 Experiment 2

Speech samples
The Polish sentence matrix test (PSMT). The speech was presented to
the participants at the constant level of 65 SPL.
The PSMT consists of 10 names, 10 verbs, 10 numerals, 10 adjectives,
and 10 nouns, i.e. a total of 50 different words that can be used
to build 100000 different sentences. More details and properties of
a PSMT can be found in Ozimek et al., 2010.

Noise samples - maskers
• noise in a school corridor during the break.
• a busy road taken about 35 meters from the middle of the
road.
• a bus interior (Neoplan) during normal drive conditions.
• a tram type 105N2k-2000 interior during the normal drive
conditions.
• a jet airplane over-flight.
• an Inter-City train pass-by taken 25 m from the rail track.
• a tram type 105n pass-by taken 25 m from the rail track.
• babble noise (uniform noise created from a speech by
averaging a large number of a Polish-language speech
material).

Experiment I - part 1:
Psychometric curve for speech intelligibility scores
• The method of constant stimuli was used to obtain the
speech intelligibility function for 7 values of SNR: -6 dB, -4
dB, -2 dB, 0 dB, 2 dB, 4 dB, 6 dB. (SNR 0dB=SRT)
• Each masker (8 environmental noises) was presented with a
list of 20 sentences consisting of 5 randomly chosen words
from the Polish sentence matrix test (PSMT)
• After the utterance of a sentence, a five column (names,
verbs, numerals, adjectives) - 50-word push-button panel
was displayed on an LCD screen. The participants’ task was
to indicate words from the played-back sentence and
confirm their choice with the ‘OK’ button

Experiment I - part 2:
Assessment of difficulty in speech comprehension
After each utterance the participants were prompted to assess their difficulty in
comprehending speech on an ascending scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means not at all
difficult and 10 extremely difficult
Push-button with a question about the difficulty in speech comprehension

Experiment I -results

Experiment I: results presented for each SNR

Aannoyance rating – speech intelligibility
y=9.0403e -0.749x

Experiment II:
Assessment of noise annoyance presented alone
Push-button with the question about the noise annoyance
scaling

Comparison of annoyance assessment

Results of Experiment I and II

Comparison of annoyance assessment

Conclusions
• The best approximation of the relationship between the speech
intelligibility and difficulty in speech comprehension is the following
exponential function y=9.0403e -0.749x . This relationship was
obtained for 7 different SNR values of eight environmental noises
(Experiment I)
• The differences between annoyance ratings which were assigned to
the same noises during different activities, are not statistically
significant (Experiment I and II) for SNR= 0, 2, 4, 6.
• The outcome of this study is restricted to the situation where
speech is presented to the listener at 65 dB sound level and the
Polish sentence matrix test (PSMT) test is applied

• Thank you for your kind attention!
• Dr Honorata Hafke-Dys, dr Tomasz Kaczmarek – co-authors of
the presented results
• Mgr Paweł Libiszewski , dr Jędrzej Kociński –technical
assistance
• This work was supported by the grant from the Polish-
Norwegian Research Fund – project no. PNRF-167-AI-1/07.

Polish-Norwegian Research Fund
Quality of public life determined by good hearing and speech
communication
SP 1
Auditory research in the light of
speech intelligibility
SP 2
Speech intelligibility as an index of the
quality of public life
WP 1
Development of
new sentence
intelligibility tests
for children and
improvement of
recently designed
tests for adults
WP 2
Development of new
environment noise annoyance
index related to intelligibility
data
WP 3
Application of new
intelligibility tests to
assessment of acoustic
quality of hearing aids
and implants
WP 4
Intelligibility tests aimed at
evaluation of acoustic
quality of public buildings
and improvement of
Internet and telephone
procedures for self-testing
intelligibility