INFLUENCE OF TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF THE SONIC ENVIRONMENT ON ANNOYANCE

The relationship between environmental noise exposure and annoyance has been well-investigated and well-documented, insofar that the European Commission includes estimated annoyance as an evaluation measure for the impact of noise exposure (2002-49-EC). Although exposure-effect relationships for different sources have been generally accepted, the uncertainty in these models remains substantial (Marquis-Favre et al. 2005; Fields et al. 2000) for example have calculated that the response between communities differs on average by the equivalent of about 7 dB in noise exposure. One major issue here is the contribution of non-acoustical factors (Fields 1993) and another the uncertainty of the exposure modeling method (Lercher et al. 2008b).