A model for the perception of environmental sound based on notice-events

An approach is proposed to shed light on the mechanisms underlying human perception of environmental sound that intrudes in everyday living. Most research on exposure-effect relationships aims at relating overall effects to overall exposure indicators in an epidemiological fashion, without including...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 126; no. 2; p. 656
Main Authors De Coensel, Bert, Botteldooren, Dick, De Muer, Tom, Berglund, Birgitta, Nilsson, Mats E, Lercher, Peter
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.08.2009
Subjects
Algorithms
Attention
Auditory Perception
Automobiles
Computer Simulation
Environment
Habituation, Psychophysiologic
Humans
Models, Psychological
Noise, Transportation
Railroads
Sound
Time Factors
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Summary:An approach is proposed to shed light on the mechanisms underlying human perception of environmental sound that intrudes in everyday living. Most research on exposure-effect relationships aims at relating overall effects to overall exposure indicators in an epidemiological fashion, without including available knowledge on the possible underlying mechanisms. Here, it is proposed to start from available knowledge on audition and perception to construct a computational framework for the effect of environmental sound on individuals. Obviously, at the individual level additional mechanisms (inter-sensory, attentional, cognitive, emotional) play a role in the perception of environmental sound. As a first step, current knowledge is made explicit by building a model mimicking some aspects of human auditory perception. This model is grounded in the hypothesis that long-term perception of environmental sound is determined primarily by short notice-events. The applicability of the notice-event model is illustrated by simulating a synthetic population exposed to typical Flemish environmental noise. From these simulation results, it is demonstrated that the notice-event model is able to mimic the differences between the annoyance caused by road traffic noise exposure and railway traffic noise exposure that are also observed empirically in other studies and thus could provide an explanation for these differences.
ISSN:1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.3158601