Fifty Years of Aircraft Noise Annoyance - Time to Introduce New Ideas

Researchers have tried for half a century to establish predictively useful relationships between transportation noise exposure and annoyance. Several curves have been developed since Schultz' initial general dose-response curve in 1978. Although most researchers agree that the annoyance of aircraft noise is only partially determined by noise exposure levels, many still believe that a single "correct" dosage-response relationship can be used to predict annoyance in all airport communities. Researchers continue to feed the ever-growing database of social survey results into correlational software which yields regression functions that only statisticians appreciate, and which lack causal interpretability. This conventional search for a holy grail of annoyance prediction is futile. Noise-induced annoyance depends on a variety of survey-specific, non-acoustic factors that move dose-response curves back and forth or up or down. A modern, causal approach to creating dose-response relationships for aircraft noise annoyance, which systematically treats non-acoustic factors and quantifies their influence, is described.