A Method to Simulate Printer Noise for Use in Psychoacoustic Tests

When office occupants work near printers, the noise generated by printers can affect occupant comfort. To support subjective listening tests, a method to generate realistic simulations of printer noise with finely controlled variations of sound attributes was developed. Printer noise is composed of both tonal and broadband components. Both components can be intermittent, continuous but time-varying, or have constant characteristics. Tonal components are simulated by using amplitude- and frequency-modulated sinusoids. Broadband noise components are simulated by passing broadband random noise through time-varying filters whose characteristics are based on modified versions of the spectrograms of measured printer noise after removal of tonal components. The broadband noise spectrogram is split into two parts: one related to short-duration impulses, and the other to more slowly varying random noise; both can be modified independently and then recombined to form a spectrogram that is used as the target for the time-varying filter design. The complete printer noise simulation is generated by adding the tonal and broadband noise simulations. These simulations will be used in psychoacoustic tests to determine how variations in each sound attribute affect acoustic comfort.