PILOT STUDY ON THE INFLUENCE OF TONAL NOISE ANNOYANCE ON WORK PERFORMANCE

摘要

The tonal noises can cause unpleasant evaluation of spaces and potentially increased complaints by mental workers. So far, however, there has been limited research on the effects of tones on human annoyance that can be used to set objective guidelines or limits on tones in noise. Current indoor noise evaluation methods do not directly account for tonal characteristics of noise. Thus, this paper addresses the relationship between human perception and noise with tonal components in the working environment. To determine relations between noise metrics (tone-to-noise ratio TNR and prominence ratio PR) and work performance the author applied psychological tests from the Vienna Test System with exposure to four test signals at the same sound pressure level with different tonal components. Results showed that noise with medium and high frequencies of tonal components were evaluated as more annoying. However lack of significant variation of psychological test results between individual signals do not give reasons for using the correction of the noise measurement result due to the tonality as for example in the ISO 1996-2.