A novel noise-induced annoyance measurement method

This paper proposes a novel method of measuring noise-induced annoyance used by jury subjective tests. Currently, noise-induced annoyance is typically measured by either rating scale or discrimination scale. The former is able to provide quantitative results, but it is very challenging to achieve the desired accuracy. The latter in general could provide more accurate results, but it is not able to provide quantitative results that are useful in many applications. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new listening test method. The proposed method introduces a reference stimulus with adjustable sound level as a benchmark for noise annoyance assessment, and the final annoyance index is reported based on the level of the reference stimulus that matches annoyance level of the sample under test. Our experiments show that the proposed method is more reliable and useful than existing methods for noise annoyance measurement.