Train noise - A psychoacoustic investigation for indoor aural comfort in high-rise urban environment in the tropics

摘要

Despite of many research on the assessment of negative impact (i.e. annoyance) of indoor aural environment, very limited research effort have been made on the positive assessment (i.e. aural comfort) of aural environment in residential settings subjected to environmental noise sources. Noise annoyance has often been related to different energy-based acoustical indicators such as L_(Aeq), L_(DEN) etc. which are unable to consider the temporal and spectral patterns of the complex noise environment. The indoor aural environment has rarely been examined for different psychoacoustic quantities, the influence of which are still unknown on indoor aural comfort subjected to environmental noise sources specially in high-rise urban built-up settings. This research investigates the indoor aural comfort in high-rise naturally ventilated residential dwellings in Singapore subjected to Train Noise. A psychoacoustic experiment was carried out to examine the indoor aural comfort and relating it with different psychoacoustic indices. Loudness, Sharpness and Roughness were found significantly correlated with the assessment of 'Noisiness' and 'Noise Disturbance' in indoor environment. Train noise with a maximum Loudness of 8 Sone, mean Sharpness of 1.25 Acum and maximum Roughness of 33 centi-Asper were found attributing to a 'quiet' indoor aural environment. This paper presents statistical models developed for subjective 'noisiness' and 'disturbances' and discusses their relationships with these psychoacoustic quantities.