Identification of Annoying Sound Emitted by Consumer Electronic Devices

摘要

There is a growing interest to integrate hard disc drives in many Consumer Electronics (CEs) forstorage of digital data. Many of these new applications, dictate low overall noise operation by thewhole system in extremely low noise background environments. In these quiet surroundings,simple analysis of the amplitude of sound may not be sufficient to assess the impression it mighthave on an observer in terms of its annoyance.This work attempts to develop a new approach to gauge the annoyance of sound emitted by alltypes of equipment slated for operation in very quiet environments. The proposed process isintuitive and may be directly related to the perceived sensation of sound by humans. As such, itprovides a means by which the designer of either a subcomponent or the system may be able toassess the acoustic emission and hence its potential annoyance in advance during development.