Assessment of Music and Water Sounds for Urban Noise Masking

Urban noise pollution attracts global concern since it seriously affects and harms human health and activities. Noise-induced annoyance is one of the salient noise effects on human perception. As an efficient noise reduction tools, noise masking scheme is employed to reduce noise-induced annoyance. Both music and water sounds are commonly used sound maskers in noise masking where music sound masking is seldom discussed for urban noise. In this study, we conduct a subjective listening test to evaluate the masking capability of music and water sounds for Singapore urban noise. The results show that masking is a good solution in mid-to-high annoyance scenario for traffic and construction noise. And music sound presents similar performance in reducing the annoyance to that of the water sounds.