The design of listening tests for impact noise annoyance ratings

Noise annoyance is characterized by irritation, discomfort, disturbance or distraction. The evaluation of impact noise based on user response provides useful information about subjective auditory perception. These assessments are carried out by participants in listening tests under laboratory conditions, where participants usually rate the annoyance caused by different samples of impact noise. The question arises as to whether it is possible to gain a meaningful insight into the human inner life by evaluating only a single quality such as annoyance. Therefore, other qualities such as loudness, allowance limit or naturalness are also included in the rating procedure. In this paper we present the design of the listening test for impact noise annoyance and the corresponding selection of investigated qualities. It describes why they were selected and how the evaluation was carried out. It also describes how descriptive qualities have been used in other studies. The technical implementation of the listening procedure is presented and correlations between the ratings of the different qualities are discussed.