Traffic noise is one of the environmental problems derived from urbanization which has caused significant impacts on people’s living. Many countries have already developed regulations concerning the acceptability of environmental noise exposure. In general, it is more objective to establish noise control standards based on the susceptibility of people. For this reason, it is important to obtain noise exposure/response relationships via social and socio-acoustic surveys. In order to establish the relationships between noise exposure and noise-induced annoyance in Taiwan, the “Guideline for the Annoyance Survey on Traffic Noise (Draft)” was proposed according to the Technical Specification ISO/TS 15666. The percentage of persons annoyed (%[A]) and the percentage of persons highly annoyed (%[HA]) are used as the descriptor of noise annoyance in a population based on the position paper prepared by the European Communities. In order to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed guideline for traffic noise annoyance surveys, a preliminary field survey was conducted according to the proposed guideline. The results show that the proposed guideline would be applicable to perform traffic noise annoyance surveys in the future. In addition,this project was to assess the traffic noise on human subjective and objective noise emotional responses, as well as for the establishment of animal physiology lab assignments to ensure that the quality of the experimental results, the proposed draft guidelines for human traffic noise annoyance survey experiment and traffic noise animal physiology experiments. The traffic noise annoyance to human and physiology of animal was investigated, in addition to develop the survey and experimental methods, but also the procedure of survey was to be in accordance with the actual implementation of the experiment. The experimental methods were improved and developed by the experimental results. For human experiment, human perception was verified by 16 subjects. The real environment of traffic noise was adopted as the experimental stimulus tone, but the sound quality and parameter changes in real road noise were uncertain. The simulated tone adopted for human trials was more appropriate for the future human experiments. For the animal experiment, there were 7 rats adopted in the animal physiology experiment. The pregnant rat failed to complete all the noise stimulation experiments because the period of pregnant was too short. The suggestions for future animal studies excluded the pregnant rat experiment were more appropriate.

Traffic Noise; Noise annoyance; Socio-acoustics surveys; Hyperacusis