Citation

Amundsen AH, Klæboe R, Aasvang GM. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2013; 133(6): 3921-3928.

Affiliation

Institute of Transport Economics (TOI), Gaustadalèen 21, 0349 Oslo, Norway.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, American Institute of Physics)

DOI

10.1121/1.4802824

PMID

23742346

Abstract

The Norwegian facade insulation study includes one pre-intervention and two post-intervention surveys. The facade-insulating measures reduced indoor noise levels by 7 dB on average. Before the intervention, 43% of the respondents were highly annoyed by noise. Half a year after the intervention, the proportion of respondents who were highly annoyed by road traffic noise had been significantly reduced to 15%. The second post-intervention study (2 yr after the first post-intervention study) showed that the proportion of highly annoyed respondents had not changed since the first post-intervention study. The reduction in the respondents' self-reported sleep disturbances (due to traffic noise) also remained relatively stable from the first to the second post-intervention study. In the control group, there were no statistically significant differences in annoyance between the pre-intervention and the two post-intervention studies. Previous studies of traffic changes have reported that people "overreact" to noise changes. This study indicated that when considering a receiver measure, such as facade insulation, the effect of reducing indoor noise levels could be predicted from exposure-response curves based on previous studies. Thus no evidence of an "overreaction" was found.

Language: en