Development of an Annoyance Prediction Model for simultaneous Exposure to Noise and Vibrations

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Ercan Altinsoy
• Subject Area: Acoustics
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 376265058

Noise and vibrations effect humans in many daily situations. One typical example is driving a motor vehicle. The stimuli emerging in such situations are usually perceived as annoying. This can be described by the perception parameter annoyance. For rating and comparing the annoyance of different exposure situations, time-consuming and technically demanding perception experiments have to be conducted.Whenever acoustic and vibratory stimuli occur simultaneously, they are jointly processed as one common overall perception event. In such a way the annoyance of multimodal exposure situations is depend on the properties of both of the stimulations. To anticipate the human perception directly from measured signals, a model for the prediction of the annoyance based on the signal properties of multimodal scenes shall be created.For purely acoustic stimuli, the perceived annoyance can already be modelled from the signals parameters. For multimodal stimuli, available studies have already revealed fundamental relationships between the acoustic and vibratory signal properties and the resulting perception values.On this basis, the first step of the planned research project is creating a multimodal exposure database. Therefore sound pressure und seat vibration signals in different kinds of vehicles and at different driving and environmental situations shall be acquired. Specific manipulations of certain signal properties create further realistic scene variations. Thereby the entirety of the created multimodal scenes represents a broad range of realistic exposure situations in motor vehicles.Subsequently the annoyance ratings for these scenes are being acquired by perception experiments at the multimodal measurement laboratory.Statistical analysis of the results forms the basis for the creation of an annoyance rating model for the multimodal scenes. Taking into consideration the temporal and spectral characteristics of both the sound and whole-body vibration signals, both physical and psychophysical parameters will be used as input values for this model.The developed forecast model shall provide the ability of estimating the annoyance of a multimodal scene, such as the strain of a vehicle operator in different situations, without the necessity of conducting perception experiments. Furthermore it can be clarified, under which circumstances either the acoustic or vibratory exposures are dominating, what makes a solely unimodal consideration of the exposure situation sufficient for the evaluation of the perceived annoyance.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants