Category: 6. Description, Criteria, and Procedures Used to Determine Human Response to Noise and Vibration

The effects of vibration on people’s health and criteria for protection are discussed in Chapter 5. Criteria for human comfort and annoyance, in particular for vibration in buildings, are discussed in this section. 6.17.1 Human Comfort in Buildings Vibration discomfort depends on many factors including the characteristics of the vibration. Most standards are designed to assess…

Using some of the noise measures and descriptors discussed and surveys and human response studies, various criteria have been proposed so that noise environments can be determined that are acceptable for people, for speech communication, for different uses of buildings, for sleep, and for different land uses. In some countries such criteria are used to write…

6.15.1 Sleep Interference Various investigations have shown that noise disturbs sleep [56–62]. It is well known that there are several stages of sleep and that people progress through these stages as they sleep [56]. Noise can change the progression through the stages and if sufficiently intense can awaken the sleeper. Most studies have been conducted…

In some community noise measures, corrections are applied to community noise levels to account for pure‐tone components or impulsive character, seasonal corrections (summer or winter when windows are always closed), type of district (rural, normal suburban, urban residential, noisy urban, very noisy urban), and for previous exposure (such corrections are similar to those for NR).…

6.13.1 Traffic Noise Index In an attempt to develop acceptability criteria for traffic noise from roads in residential areas, Griffiths and Langdon [45] produced a unit for rating traffic noise, the traffic noise index (TNI). They measured A‐weighted traffic noise levels at 14 sites in the London area and interviewed 1200 people at these sites in the process.…

In recent years some countries have continued to use NEF or NNI or similar noise measures or descriptors related to those that include a weighting based on the number of aircraft movements [29]. However, because they are much simpler to measure and seem to give adequate correlation with subjective response, there has been a move…

The noise levels around airports are of serious concern in many countries. Several attempts have been made to produce measures to predict and assess the annoyance caused by aircraft noise in the community. A study of rating measures in 1994 showed 11 different measures in use in the 16 countries studied [29]. The following measures…

The equivalent SPL discussed above accounts for the fluctuation in noise level of an unsteady noise by forming an average SPL resulting in an equivalent steady A‐weighted SPL. There is, however, some evidence that unsteady noise (e.g. from noise sources such as passing road vehicles or aircraft movements) is more disturbing than steady noise. To…

In the United States during the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed a measure, from the equivalent SPL, known as the day–night equivalent level (DNL) or Ldn that accounts for the different response of people to noise during the night [31] given by (6.7) where Ld is the 15‐hour daytime A‐weighted equivalent SPL (from 07:00 to 22:00 hours) and Ln is the 9‐hour nighttime…

Although Leq measurements provide practical results for fluctuating noise, an Leq measurement does not remove ambiguity in the case of transient noise (e.g. aircraft flyover or a vehicle drive‐by). In such a case the SEL is very useful and corresponds to an equivalent SPL Leq normalized to one second, combining both loudness and duration in a single metric. Therefore, SEL is…