Characterizing the sound quality of air-conditioning noise

The aim of the psychoacoustic study presented here was to characterize listeners' preferences for a set of sounds produced by different brands and models of indoor air-conditioning units. In addition, some synthetic sounds, created by interpolation between recorded sound samples, were integrated into the set. The multidimensional perceptual space and the corresponding physical space representative of the sound set were determined with multidimensional scaling (MDS). Then the preferences for different classes of listeners were related to the physical space. The best spatial model yielded by the MDS had three common dimensions and specificities. The three dimensions are correlated with the ratio of the noisy part of the spectrum to the harmonic part (NHR), with the spectral center of gravity (SC) and with loudness (N). Two classes of listeners can be distinguished in terms of preference. For one, preference varied primarily with loudness, whereas for the other it varied more with SC and NHR. However, for one class the preference grew with the parameter NHR, while it decreased for the other class. The results replicate under different laboratory conditions and indicate the usefulness of this sound quality assessment approach for characterizing appliance noises.