Prediction of psychoacoustic parameters

Noise is defined as an audible sound which either disturbs the silence, or an intentional sound that listening to leads to annoyance. Thus, it is clearly defined that the assignment of noise cannot be reduced to simple determining objective parameters like the A-weighted SPL. The question whether a sound is judged as noise can only be answered after the transformation from the sound event into an hearing event has been accomplished. The evaluation of noise depends on the physical characteristics of the sound event, on the psychoacoustical features of the human ear as well as on the psychological aspects of men. The subjectively felt noise quality depends not only on the A-weighted sound-pressure level, but also on other psychoacoustical parameters such as loudness, roughness, sharpness, etc. The known methods for the prediction of the spatial A-weighted SPL distribution in dependence on the propagation are not suitable to predict psychoacoustic parameters in an adequate way. Especially, the roughness provoked by modulation or the sharpness generated by an accumulation of high, frequent sound energy cannot offhandedly be predicted as distance dependent.