Evaluating the perceived annoyance from impact sounds: Validation of previous experiments with an expanded set of recordings

Impact noise from neighbors in multi-unit residential buildings is commonly seen as an annoyance that may reduce the quality of life of building occupants. A project at the National Research Council of Canada has been evaluating the perceived annoyance from different types of impact sound, through the implementation of listening experiments in Canada, Korea, and Germany. A comparison among the countries revealed that test participants agreed on the relative annoyance of different impact sources, but the absolute levels of the annoyance were different between participants from the three countries. To explain the differences between the participants from the three countries, moderating factors, such as the test participants’ housing situation and noise sensitivity, were taken into account. In order to validate the previous findings, the results from a further listening experiment conducted at the National Research Council using the same methodology but with a new set of impact sounds recorded on a wider variety of floor-ceiling assembly types will be presented.