Evaluating the equivalence of verbal scales and question stems to be used in English and Japanese noise annoyance questions

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the equivalence of noise annoyance scales and questions recommended by Team 6 (Community Response to Noise) of ICBEN for English and Japanese, two strikingly different languages. The first experiment was conducted with bilingual subjects in order to test a key assumption of the method established by ICBEN Team 6 for the development of equivalent noise annoyance scales: subjects who speak different languages interpret the concept of “highest degree” of annoyance similarly. The results indicate that English- and Japanese-speaking subjects do interpret the “highest degree” similarly. The second experiment tested for effects of wording differences. English- and Japanese-speaking subjects were presented with noise annoyance questions of one of three format types. The first type was similar to the question format recommended by ICBEN Team 6. It focused on the degree to which a given noise would “bother, disturb, or annoy” the subject. The second asked subjects to evaluate the “bothersome, annoying, or disturbing” quality of the noise. The third asked how much the noise would “worry, irritate, or concern” the subject. No significant difference was found in responses to the three formats when subjects evaluated noise in laboratory conditions.     

Standardized noise annoyance scales in Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese

Internationally standardized annoyance scales are required in order to compare community responses to environmental noises measured in various linguistic regions. ICBEN Team 6 organized an international joint study to establish standardized noise annoyance scales and has developed scales and questions in nine linguistic regions. With the exception of Japan, all of these regions were Euro-American. Thus, it has been necessary to augment the original ICBEN study by utilizing the ICBEN method to construct noise annoyance scales for use in other Asian countries, because noise pollution is becoming an increasingly important environmental issue in these countries. Also, Asian data should be compared internationally with Euro-American data. The present study reports on the use of the ICBEN method to construct annoyance scales in Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese.     

A mathematical model for noise propagation between buildings

Noise propagation in residential areas and similar environments is characterized by multiple scattering of sound between buildings. Approximate solutions to this problem are obtained by modelling this type of propagation as diffusion of incoherent sound particles. These solutions describe the gross dependence of sound energy density on the distance from the noise source(s); the relevant parameters of the environment are the (average) height, scattering cross section and absorption of the buildings. Particular consideration is given to the propagation of noise from freely flowing traffic, for which not only average values of the energy density but also expressions describing the range and frequency of fluctuations are presented.     

Noise mapping in urban environments: A Taiwan study

This study analyzed the spatial characteristics of urban environmental noise by using noise maps produced at 345 noise monitoring stations in Tainan, Taiwan. Noise data were collected at varying intervals: morning, afternoon, and evening in both summer and winter. The spatial distributions of the noise levels during each time interval were evaluated and visualized by geographic information systems. The analytical results indicated that the highest and lowest average noise levels were 69.6 dB(A) and 59.3 dB(A) during summer mornings and winter evenings, respectively. Comparison of monitored noise levels with regulatory standards revealed that noise standard violations, which usually occur on summer evenings, are as high as 23 dB(A). Furthermore, the results of noise exposure analysis showed that over 90% of the Tainan City population are exposed to unacceptable noise as defined by US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The findings of this study show that noise maps can be useful for investigating noise in urban environments.     

On the active periods of nonlinear Shot Noise

We study the temporal ‘on-and-off’ structure of the recently introduced nonlinear Shot Noise model [I. Eliazar, J. Klafter, PNAS 102 (2005) 13779; I. Eliazar, J. Klafter, Nonlinear shot noise: Lévy, Noah, & Joseph, Physica A (2006), to appear], in which: (i) shots of random magnitudes ‘bombard’ a system stochastically in time; (ii) the magnitudes of ‘incoming’ shots decay to zero nonlinearly; and, (iii) the overall effect of the shots on the system is additive. When the shot-inflow and shot-decay satisfy certain conditions, the resulting Shot Noise alternates randomly between ‘active periods’ (in which the noise is ‘on’) and ‘silent periods’ (in which noise is ‘off’).The statistical properties of the ‘active’ and ‘silent’ periods are analyzed, and the resulting ‘on-and-off’ Shot Noise structure is explored. Explicit formulae for means, variances, Laplace transforms, and other statistics are derived in closed-form. Based on this analysis, Shot Noise systems are categorized into three classes: transient, null-recurrent, and recurrent; and, these classes are characterized both analytically and probabilistically. Within the null-recurrent class, systems whose ‘active periods’ are governed by heavy-tailed probability distributions are further characterized.     

The new policy of the European Commission for the abatement of railway noise

With the Green Paper on Future Noise Policy published in November 1996, the European Commission began to step up its activities in the field of European noise abatement policy including the railway sector. The Commission has convened various working groups (WG) on noise reception and emissions in order to develop proposals for the new European noise policy. The Railway Noise WG started its work in December 1999. Furthermore, the Commission is going to enforce noise emission limits for high-speed and conventional train sets operating on the trans-European network within the Interoperability Directives of the European Union.This paper reports on the reasons for the new European noise policy. It describes how railway noise regulations are developed within the framework of the Interoperability Directives. First, limit proposals for high-speed train sets are presented. Results of the activities of the Railway Noise WG are described.     

Speech-Music-Noise Discrimination in Sound Indexing of Multimedia Documents

Sound indexing and segmentation of digital documents especially in the internet and digital libraries are very useful to simplify and to accelerate the multimedia document retrieval. We can imagine that we can extract multimedia files not only by keywords but also by speech semantic contents. The main difficulty of this operation is the parameterization and modelling of the sound track and the discrimination of the speech, music and noise segments. In this paper, we will present a Speech/Music/Noise indexing interface designed for audio discrimination in multimedia documents. The program uses a statistical method based on ANN and HMM classifiers. After pre-emphasis and segmentation, the audio segments are analysed by the cepstral acoustic analysis method. The developed system was evaluated on a database constituted of music songs with Arabic speech segments under several noisy environments.     

Analysis of MPN, MHN and Phase Noise of a Two-Mode Semiconductor Laser

Intensity noise including Mode Partition Noise (MPN) and Mode Hopping Noise (MHN), and Phase/Frequency Noise Spectrum (FNS) are calculated for a two-mode semiconductor laser. RIN is derived considering of MPN and MHN effect.     

Noise estimation based on time–frequency correlation for speech enhancement

As a fundamental part of speech enhancement, noise estimation is particularly challenging in highly non-stationary noise environments. In this work, we propose an effective algorithm on the basis of the “Improved Minima Controlled Recursive Averaging (IMCRA)” with the objective to improve the performance of noise estimation. The main contributions of this work are: (i) in the algorithm, a rough decision about speech presence is proposed by calculating the autocorrelation and cross-channel correlation of the T–F (Time–Frequency) units; (ii) with this decision, we refine the smoothing parameters for the smoothing of noisy power spectrum and the recursive averaging in noise spectrum estimation as well as the weighting factor for the a priori SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) estimation in the IMCRA; (iii) we improve the search of local minima during spectral bursts by adding a minimum search with a shorter window. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm. The experimental results illustrate that, compared with the IMCRA, the proposed approach significantly improves the accuracy of noise spectrum estimation and the quality of enhanced speech in the typical noise situations.     

The new EC Noise Directive to protect employees at the workplace

The planned provisions of the new Noise Directive to protect employees drawn up in 2001 are analysed and evaluated on the basis of the existing Directive. Although the new Noise Directive provides for a number of major changes, the basic problems of noise control at the workplace are not dealt with.     

Effects of noise on human efficiency and some individual differences

This paper begins with a brief review of research on the way in which loud noise affects the efficiency of human work, leading to an examination of some differences between individuals in the extent to which efficiency is affected. Noise is regarded as producing a narrowing of attention towards work components of high priority, an effect which is seen as providing a basis for understanding previous contradictory interpretations in this area. Extroverted people seem more susceptible to this narrowing of attention, while the performance of introverts is more stable. Some related research on individual differences in performance, and preference for noisy environments is also discussed.     

An experiment on auditory and non-auditory disturbances caused by railway and road traffic noises in outdoor conditions

In a laboratory experiment, disturbance caused by two types of noise (railway and road traffic noises) at three noise levels (55, 65 and ) in two kinds of stimulation conditions (listening and calculation) was investigated. Thirty Japanese and thirty Chinese subjects performed a listening or calculation task while each noise was presented for 6 min. The subjects assessed the disturbance of their activities using 5-point verbal scales constructed by ICBEN method. A railway bonus, mainly caused by noise masking, was found in the listening task but not in the calculation task. There was a significant difference between the effects of two noises on listening performance when noise level was 75 dB, but no difference was found between railway and road traffic noises on task performance. The results suggest that the disturbance evaluation is determined by several factors and that the interaction among the factors increases with the increase of noise level. Evaluation disturbance is not related to task performance in certain cases.     

集合卡尔曼滤波在时变声速剖面追踪中的性能分析

对集合卡尔曼滤波在时变海洋环境下的声速剖面追踪性能进行了分析。将南海实验背景下普林斯顿海洋模型预报的声速剖面正交分解为3阶系数组成的状态-空间形式,其状态转移方程建模为3阶自回归过程;基于卡尔曼反馈理论,利用适合于水平非均匀模型RAM仿真的观测声压场对系统状态进行校正,实现声速剖面的动态追踪。在水平均匀、水平非均匀和海底参数失配环境下的仿真结果均能较好地实现对声速剖面的追踪,验证了算法的可行性。同时对不同信噪比、粒子数、阵元数和海底参数失配等情况下的分析表明,观测信息量的增加可以有效抑制观测误差和模型误差的影响,相关结论得到了实验数据的验证。      

Non-linear Shot Noise: Lévy, Noah, & Joseph

We introduce and study a generic non-linear Shot Noise system-model. Shots of random magnitudes arrive to the system stochastically, following an arbitrary time-homogeneous Poisson point process. After ‘hitting’ the system, the magnitude of an arriving shot decays to zero. The decay is governed by an arbitrary differential-equation dynamics. Shots are independent, and their overall effect on the system is additive: the system's noise level at time t equals the sum of the magnitudes, at time t, of all the shots arriving to the system prior to time t.The resulting Shot Noise is: (i) a Lévy process when the decay-dynamics are degenerate; (ii) a Lévy-driven Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process when the decay-dynamics are linear; and, (iii) a stationary non-Markov process when the decay-dynamics are non-linear.The resulting Shot Noise admits an underlying Lévy structure—which we explicitly compute, and can yield both the Noah effect and the Joseph effect. Closed-form analytic formulae for various statistics are derived, including: the log-Laplace transform and cumulants of the stationary noise level; the process’ auto-covariance function; and, the process’ range-of-dependence.     

Secure Quantum Communication Scheme for Six-Qubit Decoherence-Free States

Noise is currently unavoidable in quantum communication environments. Eavesdroppers can exploit this issue by disguising themselves as channel noise to avoid detection during eavesdropping checks performed by legitimate communicants. This paper first proposes a new coding function comprising eight unitary operations for two orthogonal bases for six-qubit decoherence-free states. Subsequently, based on the coding function, the first deterministic secure quantum communication (DSQC) scheme for quantum channels with collective noise is developed. The developed DSQC is robust against both collective-dephasing noise and collective-rotation noise Senders can choose one of six-qubit decoherence-free states to encode their two-bit message, and receivers simply conduct Bell measurement to obtain the message. Analyses conducted verify that the proposed scheme is both secure and robust.     

The Feynman integrand for the perturbed harmonic oscillator as a Hida distribution

We review some basic notions and results of White Noise Analysis that are used in the construction of the Feynman integrand as a generalized White Noise functional. We show that the Feynman integrand for the harmonic oscillator in an external potential is a Hida distribution.     

Scenario analysis and noise action planning: Modelling the impact of mitigation measures on population exposure

This paper reports on strategic noise mapping research conducted in Dublin, Ireland. Noise maps are constructed for the day–evening–night-time and night-time periods and levels of population exposure are estimated for the same periods. In methodological terms, the research uses the UK’s calculation of road traffic noise (CRTN) method for calculating noise levels in the study area. This method has been adopted as the interim calculation method by the Irish authorities responsible for meeting the obligations set out in the EU Environmental Noise Directive (END). The research also investigates the usefulness of three noise mitigation measures for ‘acoustical planning’ purposes: traffic reductions, speed reductions and erection of acoustical barriers. The results indicate that levels of population exposure during night-time are extremely high relative to guideline limits set down by the World Health Organisation. In addition, the results highlight the significant role that certain noise mitigation measures can play in good ‘acoustical planning’.     

A survey of low velocity and coaxial jet noise with application to prediction

A review of recent published data on low velocity jet noise is given together with previously unpublished results taken from the Rolls-Royce Noise Research Programme on model rigs and full-scale engines. Noise correlations are given which show that at low jet velocities, the low frequency exhaust noise which is commonly referred to as jet noise, emitted from the fan stream of a turbofan engine is considerably lower in level than that from the (hot) centre stream. From this result, a new prediction procedure for coaxial jet noise of turbofan engines is then developed. Comparisons are given which show that this method gives good correlation with measured results from a number of full-scale turbofan engines. The importance of accurate estimation of the “ground reflection effect” is clearly demonstrated. A critical review of published jet noise data from model coaxial jets is given and the need for further extensive testing emphasized.