Annoyance potential of wind turbine noise compared to road traffic noise
Regular paper
Empa
Monday 1 june, 2015, 11:00 - 11:20
0.6 Madrid (49)
Abstract:
The production of wind energy becomes ever more important worldwide, so that
increasing parts of the population are being exposed to wind turbine noise.
There is evidence that wind turbine noise has a high annoyance potential, which
might be caused by specific sound characteristics such as amplitude modulation.
Compared to road traffic noise, however, knowledge on the annoyance effects of
wind turbine noise is still scarce. In this study, the annoyance potentials of
wind turbine noise and road traffic noise were therefore investigated and
compared. To that aim, listening tests were performed in the laboratory,
allowing to control the noise situations and to exclude confounders like visual
effects present in field surveys. For the listening tests, specific sound
scenarios were generated, either by sound synthesis (wind turbine noise) or by
mixing of single pass-by recordings (road traffic noise). The set of sound
scenarios allowed for auralisation of variations of three factors potentially
influencing annoyance, namely source type (wind turbine, road traffic), sound
pressure level, and temporal level variation (no, periodic, and random
variation). Subjects were exposed to these different sound scenarios, and their
ratings on subjectively perceived annoyance were collected. The factorial design
of the experiment allows for separating the individual contributions of the
above three factors to the annoyance ratings. Here, the setup of the listening
tests, the most important results and possible application in environmental
legislation are presented.