ANNOYANCE CAUSED BY DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTAL NOISES

The extent of interference with various activities was studied among populations in areas exposed to noise from aircraft, road traffic, trains and tramways. When areas with differences in the extent of general annoyance were compared, similar differences in the extent of the various activity interferences were found, except for those due to vibrations. As an example of the differences in the activity interference pattern, it was found that road traffic noise interfered significantly less with speech than train noise, whereas both noise types caused roughly the same interference with rest/sleep. The results suggest that uniform weighted annoyance scores incorporating various kinds of activity interference are not valid for all types of environmental noises. Interference due to vibrations probably has to be treated separately from that due to noise. © 1979.