Abstract
A study has been conducted to investigate the subjective responses of loudness and annoyance according to the exposed time of urban traffic noise in controlled laboratory environment. To make a closer inspection into psychological response relevant to noise characteristics while varying the time of exposure to noise, the subjects were presented a set of noises with different exposed time and requested to judge spontaneously on a 100-unipolar scale. To be concrete, the subjects were exposed to noises being varied in time from 15 sec up to max. 1,200 sec for the controlled traffic noise sources. So far achieved from laborious tests, it has an importance being on the logarithmic relations of perceived loudness and exposed time, say, it is more increased the perceived loudness in the sorter exposed time than in the longer exposed time. However, the trend is said to be not effective for the case of annoyance. On the other hand, the subjective impressions on relative annoyance of noise is shown to be correlated with the noise characteristics such as loudness (sones), tonality and time with logarithmic scale, the product correlation moment being calculated as $R^{2}=0.99$. The variances to be explained for annoyance assessments through varying the time of exposure were ranged between 30 % and 50% for the exposed time, $27{\sim}37%$ for tonality, and $34{\sim}20%$ for loudness, respectively With these results, hopefully, it can be helpful for those who want to work out an experimental design for evaluating an environmental noise or to quantify any psychological dimensions found in annoyance assessments.
