Annoyance evoked by combined patterns of irregular intermittent noise

摘要

In the environment, noise from different sources appears in various complex time patterns. The question is how do we perceive them, as one composite or as figure-ground? The answer to this question is pertinent to modeling of total annoyance forcombined patterns of different community noises.Figure-ground perception is well known in vision. In particular flickering areas of the visual field are predominantly perceived as backgrounds and the adjacent nonflickering areas as foreground [6]. This perceptual phenomenon appears when the averagetemporal luminance of the flickering and nonflickering areas is kept equal. Therefore, luminance differences cannot explain this kind of spatially separated figure-ground phenomenon of perception. It seems that figure-ground perception plays an important role also in audition. For example, taking an environmental approach to noise, Preis' [5] claimed that noise perception is not only determined by properties of the noise but on properties of theambient noise as well. In two experiments, irregular intermittent noises were studied in order to find out if auditory figure-ground perception exists and if the phenomenon is relevant to noise annoyance.