Recording and playback techniques for assessment of noise in the laboratory

  • Celik, Emine (Project Participant)
  • Pedersen, Christian Sejer (Project Participant)
  • Møller, Henrik (Project Participant)
  • Persson-Waye, Kerstin (Project Participant)

Project Details

Description

Experimental studies are an important complement to epidemiological studies for obtaining a deeper understanding of reactions to noise. In order to obtain results that are relevant also for real life situations it is highly important for the experimental setting to have high ecological validity. This can be achieved by arranging the experimental room, the experimental protocol and the sound exposure in a way that is perceived to be familiar and natural for the test subject. In order to ensure validity between real life and experimental settings, the recording and reproduction of sounds must be done in a way that minimizes their influence on the sound perception. It is assumed that a precondition for this is that the physical sound presented to the subjects has to be as close as possible (within the natural limitations that each technique has) to the sound, they would have been exposed to in the original sound field. Today, various recording and playback techniques are used as a basis for reproduction of sound in the laboratory. For this project, two main recording/playback techniques (monophonic and binaural) were chosen because of their wide usage in the area. Although the basic procedures in these techniques are well known and easily used in many contexts, it is not straightforward to implement them in a critical application such as laboratory assessment of noise. This project is intended to describe a methodological approach to making valid recordings of sounds that have different temporal, frequency and spatial characteristics simultaneously, and how to ensure a valid reproduction of them using these two main techniques. The project focuses on the optimization of the physical test setup and improvement of the sound reproduction by using digital equalization filters which are based on the measurement of room impulse response and headphone transfer functions on human test subjects. The result of the project was a "livingroom environment" test setup with an accurate and realistic sound exposure which was used in the project "Influence of recording/playback technique on subjective evaluation of loudness, annoyance and unpleasantness". The sound exposure has been verified by both simulations and measurements.Supported by STVF/FTP.

StatusFinished
Effective start/end date19/05/201031/12/2017

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