View article

Aircraft noise is consistently rated as more annoying than noise from other sources with similar intensity. In three experiments, it was investigated whether this penalty is due to the source identity of the noise. In the first experiment, four samples were played to participants engaged in a working memory task: road traffic noise, an Airbus 320 flyover, and unidentifiable, transformed versions of these samples containing the same spectral content and envelope. Original, identifiable samples were rated as more annoying than the transformed samples. A second experiment tested whether these results were due to the absence of tonal components in the transformed samples. This was partly the case: an additional sample, created from the A320 flyover by filtering out major tonal components, was rated as less annoying than the original A320 sample, but as more annoying than the transformed sample. In a third experiment …