Sound annoyance

Impact on health and well-being

Sound annoyance negatively affects well-being and comfort, triggering physiological responses such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, which may lead to hypertension. Hearing impairment, including increased hearing threshold and tinnitus, is another possible consequence. EEG and magnetoencephalography studies show increased central nervous system activity, while biochemical changes include elevated epinephrine secretion and adrenal cortical activity.

Epidemiological investigations link sound annoyance to resentment, displeasure, and interference with thoughts, feelings, or activities. Unwanted sounds can mask safety indicators, diminishing well-being. Correlated factors include increased absence from work, sleep disturbance, and impaired cognitive task performance.

Measurement

Historically, nuisance sound has been measured using A-weighted sound pressure level metrics like maximum sound pressure level with one-second integration, day-night average sound level, or other long-term averages. Measurement uses a sound level meter with statistical averaging and corrections.

Psychoacoustic analysis shows sound pressure level is a less than ideal predictor of human reception, so efforts since the 1960s have applied loudness metrics incorporating spectral and temporal masking and level-dependent frequency weighting. Integration of sounds into a dose estimate traditionally follows Stevens's power law with power or energy summation. More recent work examines factors like onset rate and masking.

Law in the Netherlands

Sound annoyance is subjective and cannot be fully covered by law, but the Netherlands has laws protecting noise-sensitive buildings from pollution, with different rules for airplanes, traffic, industry, and neighbors. Traffic and industry are clustered into four categories: road traffic inside urban areas, outside urban areas, railway traffic, and industrial noise. Each has a preferred limit (lower bound) not to be exceeded in planned noise, and a specified limit (upper bound) that can only be exceeded exceptionally. Neighbor-induced sound annoyance has no law, but the government offers neighborhood mediation by an independent mediator.

Did You Know?

• The European Union advises not exceeding 40 dB Lnight outside the residence at nighttime.
• About 20% of people living in or near urban areas suffer from sounds at night that exceed the interim threshold of 55 dB Lnight.