Conference_programme: 10.4 - Noise indicators for impact assessment
Lecture: Short-term annoyance due to railway noise in urban areas: indices accounting for different annoying acoustical features
Author(s): Marquis-Favre Catherine, Vallin Pierre-Augustin, Bleuse Jules
Summary:
The European Commission's 2011 White Paper mentioned key goals to strengthen the role of rail in the transport system. Even if rail is acknowledged to be the transport mode with the lowest environmental impact, non-auditory effects on health such as noise annoyance will be an important issue with growth of rail traffic. Railway noise annoyance may be predicted using noise exposure relationships recommended by the European Union. These relationships using the day-evening-night level index lead to a poor predictive quality when the relationships were tested using recent data from socio-acoustical surveys. Mean-energy based indices are often questioned in the literature to predict noise annoyance. Actually, mean acoustical energy is not the only factor which may influence noise annoyance responses. Various acoustical and non-acoustical factors may be relevant to enhance actual noise annoyance models. The objective of the study is to contribute to the enhancement of a model for railway noise annoyance. To that aim, noise annoyance was assessed in laboratory conditions. A first step was to highlight annoying auditory sensations evoked by railway noise in urban areas. A second step was to propose relevant acoustical and psychoacoustical indices to account for the highlighted annoying auditory sensations.\nThe analysis showed the influence of different acoustical features of railway noise on annoyance: sound energy, spectral content, irregular and regular fluctuations. Different indices from the literature were tested to account for these features, and new indices were proposed to account for regular and irregular temporal fluctuations.\n
Corresponding author
Name: Dr Catherine Marquis-Favre
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Country: France
