Annoyance and Speech Interference from Noise

Abstract

In Experiment One, noise from five home appliance and five shop tools was evaluated for speech interference (ie words missed) and annoyance by 23 subjects (11 male, 12 female). Both speech interference and annoyance were highly (r² = .76 and .66) correlated with dbA noise level.

In Experiment Two, 15 “industrial” noises (mean dbA=84; range = 59 to 97) were evaluated for annoyance by 100 subjects (79 male, 21 female). The annoyance vote was analyzed by analysis of covariance. In addition to annoyance being a function of dbA, the subject's gender, age and whether they were a student or not were significant predictor's of annoyance. A simple predictor equation was ANNOY (vote on scale 1 to 5) = 3.05 + .124 (dbA—84) + .001 (dbA-84)² + .16 (if student) with r²= .60.

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