An investigation of the age effect on acoustical annoyance developed from data of previous studies. (April 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ni, Ke; Huang, Yu
• Is Part Of: Applied acoustics. Volume 192(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-04
• Subjects: Comfort -- Annoyance -- Noise -- Age; Acoustical engineering -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 620.2
• DOI: 10.1016/j.apacoust.2022.108720
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0003-682X

Abstract

Highlights: The age effects on noise-induced annoyance among studies are investigated using category rating methods with different scales using a unified scale and a weight coefficient. The noise-induced annoyance changed significantly with age in a trend of "descending-rising-falling-stable" in the process of "children-teen-youth-middle age". The present results can be extended by using the same methodology by adding more available data. Abstract: Very few studies investigated the age effect on noise-induced annoyance (discomfort) among the many studies of subjective responses to noise. It is difficult to determine a quantitative model featuring the relationship between noise-induced annoyance and age from several laboratory studies due to relatively small samples and limited age groups. This paper investigated recent studies (published after the year 2000) on noise-induced annoyance by the literature review method. We classified the studies according to their rating scales and labels of anchors and transferred annoyance values of different studies to a unified scale. A probability density function represented the age distribution in each experiment under the small sample t -distribution assumption. A weight coefficient was applied to obtain the weighted average annoyance at the age range that overlapped several studies. The noise-induced annoyance changed significantly with age in a trend of "descending-rising-falling-stable" in the process of "children-teen-youth-middle age". We proposed a set of tentative equations to describe the relationship between noise-induced annoyance at 55 dBA and age in the range 12–55 yrs.