ASA - ANSI/ASA S12.9 PART 4
American National Standard Quantities and Procedures for Description and Measurement of Environmental Sound – Part 4: Noise Assessment and Prediction of Long-term Community Response
Organization: | ASA |
Publication Date: | 1 January 2005 |
Status: | inactive |
Page Count: | 50 |
scope:
This Standard specifies methods to assess environmental sounds and to predict the potential annoyance response of a community to outdoor long-term noise from any and all types of environmental sounds from one or more discrete or distributed sound sources. The sound sources may be separate or in various combinations. Application of the prediction method is limited to areas where people reside and to related long-term land uses.
NOTE The long-term period is typically one year. However, the user of this Standard can employ these methods for shorter periods of time, but they should report this change and not attempt to predict percent highly annoyed using Clause 8.3 or Annex F, since the Annex F data all represent long-term situations.
This Standard describes adjustments for sounds that have special characteristics so that the long-term community response to such sounds can be predicted by a method that is based on daynight average sound level or total day-night sound exposure. Sounds, such as from highway traffic, are evaluated directly by sound exposure or sound level without adjustment. The prediction method is directly analogous to the use of day-night average sound level to predict the response of a community to general environmental sounds.
This Standard does not address the effects of short-term exposure of people to intrusive sounds in locations such as parks and wilderness areas. The Standard also does not address other effects of noise such as sleep disturbance or health effects. This Standard does not provide a method to predict the response of a community to short-term, infrequent, non-repetitive sources of sound.
This Standard introduces the application of new descriptors: adjusted sound exposure and adjusted sound exposure level. The new descriptors are closely related to sound exposure and sound exposure level, respectively. The new descriptors are introduced to facilitate the prediction of the response of communities to the wide range of outdoor sounds covered by the scope of the Standard.
The sounds are assessed either singly or in combination, allowing for consideration, when necessary, of the special characteristics of impulsiveness, tonality, onset rate, and low-frequency content. In the same manner as sound exposure and sound exposure level are used to generate total day-night sound exposure or total day-night average sound level, adjusted sound exposure or adjusted sound exposure level are used to generate adjusted total day-night sound exposure or adjusted day-night average sound level.
Annoyance is not the only possible measure of community response. One frequently cited measure is numbers of complaints, sometimes normalized to numbers of inhabitants. Complaints can be particularly relevant near factories and plants, by airports and military installations, etc. Complaints do not correlate well with long-term average metrics such as DNL (see Refs. 7 and 8 for example). Unfortunately, in general, metrics to predict the likelihood and prevalence of complaints do not yet exist with sufficient accuracy. One notable exception is the high-energy impulse sound generated by military activities and similar civilian noise sources, and informative Annex G provides procedures for assessing the risk of noise complaints from such sources.
The addition of adjustments eliminates the possibility to measure the total adjusted sound exposure or sound exposure level in a general situation that comprises a variety of sound sources (e.g., the combination of a highway leading to an airport and the airport itself). As a possible measurable alternative, this Standard introduces a new metric based on the equal-loudness level contours that were contained in ISO 226:1987. This new method uses the equal-loudness level contours as a set of dynamic filters that vary both with amplitude and frequency. This method is described in informative Annex H.