We are surrounded by the background sound of road traffic every day. It affects our well-being and our health. Most noise impact studies use the perceived annoyance caused by road traffic as an indicator of its effects and compare this with the day-evening-night noise indicator or the energy-equivalent continuous sound level. This basically tells us whether road traffic sound is perceived as too loud (i.e. annoying) or not.

However, not all noises are the same. The impression of annoyance is not only related to the volume of the sound. We have therefore developed a psychometrically validated assessment tool that covers various dimensions of road traffic sound perception. It can be used to further develop technical parameters in order to predict not only annoyance but also other salient characteristics of traffic-related background noise. It can also be used to evaluate conventional and novel noise reduction strategies.

For more information, we invite you to read our article recently published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America:

https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0035940

Copyright (2025) Acoustical Society of America. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America.

In collaboration with the Audio Communication and Technical Acoustics departments at the Technical University of Berlin, we carried out the project “Testing psychoacoustic parameters for innovative noise reduction strategies”. The final project report is now available at the Federal Highway and Transport Research Institute (BASt):

https://doi.org/10.60850/bericht-v391

We would like to express our sincere thanks to our academic advisors Michael Chudalla and Fabio Strigari.

This post is based on parts of the research project carried out at the request of the Federal Ministry of Transport, represented by the Federal Highway Research Institute, under research project No. 02.0431/2019/IRB. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

With Astrid Oehme, Paul Schweidler, Sandra Böhm, Hanns-Peter Horn, Sophie Pourpart, Philipp Kotsch, Stefan Weinzierl, André Fiebig, Moritz Schuck, Steffen Lepa