Perception of noise annoyance reduction associated with acoustic screens

This study describes the psychoacoustic experiment carried out in order to evaluate the rate of annoyance reduction obtained due to different Noise Reduction Devices (NRD). The respondents were subjected to different sound events representative of both road and railway traffic noise, as well as the same sound events auralized using a predefined set of filters obtained from a numerical model in order to simulate the attenuation obtained through the implementation of two different NRDs. Data obtained after a survey has been analysed to determine the relationship between this subjective rating of noise annoyance reduction and different intrinsic characteristics that evaluate the performance of NRDs.