Sensory evaluation of air-conditioning noise: Sound design and psychoacoutic evaluation

The aim of the psychoacoustic study presented here was to characterize listeners' preferences for a set of sounds produced by different models and brands of indoor air-conditiong units. In addition, some synthetic sounds were created on the basis of interpolation among recorded sound samples and were integrated into the set. The approach consisted first in determining the multidimensional perceptual space as well as the corresponding physical space representative of the sound set. Then the preferences for different classes of subjects were related to the physical space.