Conference_programme: 4.1 - Airport Noise
Lecture: Aircraft noise unpleasantness: impact of different signal portions on overall assessment
Author(s): Minard Antoine, Mellot Bertrand, Sciabica Jean-François
Summary:
Reducing aircraft noise in the vicinity of airport is a major concern of Aviation industry. All stakeholders have contributed these past years to important noise level reduction from individual aircraft operations. In order to further improve future aircraft, it appears important to identify and understand the aircraft noise main characteristics responsible for residents’ unpleasantness. Numerous studies have used a perceptual approach to assess the impact of some spectral components like Multiple Pure Tones on unpleasantness. Nevertheless, aircraft flyover noise usually includes large variations of sound level and spectral content over its course, with some components only appearing in some signal portions, depending on source directivities. Therefore, it is also important to address the temporal aspects of aircraft flyover noise and their relation to unpleasantness assessment.\nThis paper addresses this question by comparing unpleasantness assessment of different signal portions of aircraft flyover, with various durations. Four reference aircraft sounds were synthesized, two of which contained Multiple Pure Tones. Signal portions were then extracted from these sounds, with different lengths of 5, 10 and 20 seconds, and centered on different parts of the flyovers. The unpleasantness of each created portion was assessed with a comparative evaluation method, where several stimuli are presented at once.\nResults mainly reveal that none of the 5-second portions is representative of the overall signals in terms of assessed unpleasantness, while only the assessments of the 2 first portions of 10 seconds (beginning and middle part of the flyover) give unpleasantness ratings comparable to overall assessment. From a practical standpoint, these results offer interesting possibilities for future research on aircraft flyover perception, where shorter flyover excerpts could be considered instead of the overall signal. However, for generalization purposes, these results should be extended to field recordings and a wider variety of aircraft signatures.\n
Corresponding author
Name: Dr Jean-François SCIABICA
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Country: France
