Annoyance

About: Annoyance is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2015 publications have been published within this topic receiving 38300 citations. The topic is also known as: annoy.

Responses to noise in urban parks and in rural quiet areas

Abstract: Nowadays the protection of quiet areas is an issue of increasing importance, as also recognized in the European Directive 2002/49/EC on the environmental noise [1]. Dealing with the demanded protection of quiet areas, it is important to characterize the soundscape of these environments properly, taking into account the multidimensionality of the individual perception which includes the effects of non-acoustic factors on subjective evaluation, such as visual impression and matching the personal expectation of the environment with the actual experience. This paper describes two experimental investigations carried out recently in Italy. The first deals with noise surveys and collection of subjective appraisals of three urban parks in Naples and the second consists of laboratory listening tests where sounds recorded binaurally in countryside parks have been mixed with sounds from some type of sources at different signal-to-noise ratios and played back by headphones to a group of subjects. The results obtained show that the subject's expectation to hear a sound in a specific environment, that is its congruence with the environment where it is heard, influences the corresponding annoyance. In particular, the more the sound is congruent with the expectation of the park, the less is the evoked annoyance and, conversely, the more is its acceptability. Furthermore, the acceptability of the sound increases with decreasing of its level and detectability of non natural sounds.

WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region: A Systematic Review of Transport Noise Interventions and Their Impacts on Health

Abstract: This paper describes a systematic review (1980-2014) of evidence on effects of transport noise interventions on human health. The sources are road traffic, railways, and air traffic. Health outcomes include sleep disturbance, annoyance, cognitive impairment of children and cardiovascular diseases. A conceptual framework to classify noise interventions and health effects was developed. Evidence was thinly spread across source types, outcomes, and intervention types. Further, diverse intervention study designs, methods of analyses, exposure levels, and changes in exposure do not allow a meta-analysis of the association between changes in noise level and health outcomes, and risk of bias in most studies was high. However, 43 individual transport noise intervention studies were examined (33 road traffic; 7 air traffic; 3 rail) as to whether the intervention was associated with a change in health outcome. Results showed that many of the interventions were associated with changes in health outcomes irrespective of the source type, the outcome or intervention type (source, path or infrastructure). For road traffic sources and the annoyance outcome, the expected effect-size can be estimated from an appropriate exposure-response function, though the change in annoyance in most studies was larger than could be expected based on noise level change.

Low frequency noise "pollution" interferes with performance

Abstract: To study the possible interference of low frequency noise on performance and annoyance, subjects categorised as having a high- or low sensitivity to noise in general and low frequency noise in particular worked with different performance tasks in a noise environment with predominantly low frequency content or flat frequency content (reference noise), both at a level of 40 dBA. The effects were evaluated in terms of changes in performance and subjective reactions. The results showed that there was a larger improvement of response time over time, during work with a verbal grammatical reasoning task in the reference noise, as compared to the low frequency noise condition. The results further indicated that low frequency noise interfered with a proof-reading task by lowering the number of marks made per line read. The subjects reported a higher degree of annoyance and impaired working capacity when working under conditions of low frequency noise. The effects were more pronounced for subjects rated as high-sensitive to low frequency noise, while partly different results were obtained for subjects rated as high-sensitive to noise in general. The results suggest that the quality of work performance and perceived annoyance may be influenced by a continuous exposure to low frequency noise at commonly occurring noise levels. Subjects categorised as high-sensitive to low frequency noise may be at highest risk.