Controlling temporal factors of aural stimuli for assessment of environmental noise effects on human being

ACCOLTI, ERNESTO; MAFFEI, LUIGI; MIYARA, FEDERICO

ACTA ACUSTICA UNITED WITH ACUSTICA

S HIRZEL VERLAG

Año: 2010 vol. 96S1 p. 80 - 80

1610-1928

The perception and the human valuation of environmental noise do not only depend on the energy descriptors even if they are improved to take into account effects such as low frequency, tonality or impulsiveness effects. Both, the semantic content of the signals that compose the environmental noise and the interaction of these signals are related to the perceptual organization, grouping and selective attention in turn related to physiological (low level) and cognitive (high level) behaviors. An important factor, at both levels, is the temporal macrostructure of sound. Although effects of impulsive noises have been described and are used to improve energy measurements, the influence of temporal structures on perception is a current research topic. An instrument for controlling the time factors of the stimuli that allows the experimental design aimed for statistical analysis is addressed in this paper. The main block of the proposed instrument is an algorithm that combines sound events from a previously analyzed database by controlling the overall spectrum and the time structure of the output sound. The results are promising for statistical analysis because both the spectral and time factors can be set at different levels.