Analysing Tones in Industrial and Commercial Sound

The significance of an adverse impact at a residential receiver due to a commercial sound source can be affected by certain acoustic features. British Standard 4142:2014 allows for a correction for these features when assessing the significance of the impact, one of which is a correction for tonality. The standard provides an objective method for determining a graded correction from 0 to 6dB based on the tone audibility. However, the prescribed method uses an amplitude spectrum that is time-averaged over "at least 1 min", making the method potentially inappropriate for time-variant sounds that are commonly assessed using the standard. A study has been carried out comparing the method adopted in the standard with other available methods for evaluating tone audibility in both stationary and time-variant sounds.