Annoyance due to road traffic noise: an attempt to describe the effects of non-acoustic factors

The annoyance response is traditionally presented as the percentage of people highly annoyed as a function of the noise exposure, DNL, or similar. It is, however, a well-known fact that the noise level per se only explains about one-third of the variance of the annoyance response. An analysis based on the Community Tolerance Level, CTL, quantifies the combined effect of all non-acoustic factors, but does not explain the effect of each individual one. The paper is an attempt to separately quantify the effect of different non-acoustic factors.