Citation

Fidell S, Mestre V, Tabachnick B, Fidell L. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2013; 134(5): 4220.

Affiliation

Fidell Assoc., Inc., 23139 Erwin St., Woodland Hills, CA 91367sf@fidellassociates.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, American Institute of Physics)

DOI

10.1121/1.4831498

PMID

24181830

Abstract

Awakenings attributable to transportation noise intrusions into residential sleeping quarters are surprisingly rare events. Current methods for estimating such awakenings from indoor sound exposure levels are problematic for several reasons. They are based on sparse evidence and limited understandings; they fail to account for appreciable amounts of variance in dosage-response relationships; they are not freely generalizable from airport to airport; and predicted awakening rates do not differ significantly from zero over a wide range of sound exposure levels. Even in conjunction with additional predictors, such as time of night and assumed individual differences in "sensitivity to awakening," nominally SEL-based predictions of awakening rates remain of limited utility, and are easily mis-applied and mis-interpreted. Probabilities of awakening are more closely related to SELs scaled in units of standard deviates of local distributions of aircraft SELs, than to absolute sound levels. Self-selection of residential populations for tolerance of nighttime noise and habituation to airport noise environments offer more parsimonious and useful explanations for differences in awakening rates at disparate airports than assumed individual differences in sensitivity to awakening.

Language: en