Annoyance measurement of Singapore urban environmental noise

As a densely populated city-state, the concern of noise pollution control yearly increases in Singapore. It is well known that high sound pressure levels contribute heavily to general annoyance, but it is not the sole factor. To facilitate the creation of noise control policies, it is desirable to systematically measure the annoyance level of noise from the typical Singapore urban environment by conducting a large scale noise evaluation experiment. To achieve this objective, we first created a Singapore urban noises database. Thereafter, we analyzed the psychoacoustic features of the recorded samples in order to select well represented noise samples for subjective testing. We then introduced a novel subjective test method for short-term noise annoyance measurement. The results of subjective testing show that the proposed method is more suitable than existing methods for noise annoyance measurement.