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This article, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 2024, discusses the history and impact of noise pollution research. The author, Schultz, reviews social surveys conducted between the 1950s and 1975 to assess the annoyance caused by various sources of noise, such as aircraft, street traffic, expressway traffic, and railroads. Schultz finds that the results of 11 surveys show consistent levels of annoyance and proposes that the average of these curves is the best predictor of community annoyance due to transportation noise. Schultz's work has had a significant impact on noise assessment, with the day-night average sound level (DNL) becoming the accepted noise metric and the percentage of highly annoyed individuals becoming the accepted noise descriptor. Despite some criticism and skepticism, Schultz's simplification of noise assessment has become the basis for current standards on environmental noise assessment. [Extracted from the article]

Miller, Czech, Hellauer, Nicholas, Lohr, Jodts, Broene, Morganstein, Kali, Zhu, Cantor, Hudnall, and Melia [(2021). HMMH Report 308520.004.001] reported the findings of a 20-airport social survey sponsored by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that had been designed and conducted six years earlier. Their primary analyses yielded FICON (1992) style (national average and airport-specific bivariate logistic regression) functions relating aircraft noise exposure to the prevalence of high annoyance [FICON (1992). "Federal agency review of selected airport noise analysis issues" (Department of Defense, Washington, DC)]. Alternate analyses of these field observations offer pragmatic benefits for regulatory purposes. Community Tolerance Level (CTL) analysis yields a national average exposure-response predictive function that is nearly indistinguishable from that of a bivariate logistic regression function. Since it natively distinguishes dose-related from collective, non-dose influences on annoyance, it also permits a more parsimonious and readily understood account of the association between aircraft noise exposure and annoyance. Within the exposure range of primary contemporary regulatory concern, CTL analysis accounts for as much variance as FICON-style analysis in the association between noise exposure and predicted annoyance; provides a causal basis for regulation; and can be more effectively implemented and defended than a purely correlation-based analysis. In addition, CTL analysis helps to address the substantial disagreement between the findings of the literature and those of national and international technical consensus standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Region of the World Health Organization (WHO) recently published revised recommendations for transportation noise exposure intended to limit adverse health effects. WHO's newly recommended "safe" limit for aircraft noise exposure is about an order of magnitude lower than the limits currently adopted by most European countries. WHO defines "safe exposure" as the level corresponding to an annoyance prevalence rate of 10% highly annoyed. The revised recommendations are based on a limited selection of post-2000 publications. About half of the cited studies rely on nonstandard questionnaires, respondent selection, and definitions of annoyance prevalence rates which over-estimate annoyance. A re-analysis of a larger and more representative selection of studies that relies on standard procedures shows that no meaningful changes in prevalence rates of high annoyance with aircraft noise have occurred and that existing evidence does not support WHO's revised recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many older studies of community response to aircraft noise in fact used the same logic of questionnaire organization and wording, absolute judgment response scales, and order of questioning as more recent studies. Only five (of 65) surveys report a value of DNL of 45 dB or lower at the 10% high annoyance point.[2] Given that more than 90% of published studies indicate supposedly "unsafe" aircraft noise exposure conditions, one could reasonably expect reported risk ratios to document adverse health outcomes substantially higher than the marginal ones typically observed. Response to "Comment on 'Recent World Health Organization regulatory recommendations are not supported by existing evidence' " [J. Acoust. [Extracted from the article]

Numerous relationships between noise exposure and transportation noise-induced annoyance have been inferred by curve-fitting methods. The present paper develops a different approach. It derives a systematic relationship by applying an a priori, first-principles model to the findings of forty three studies of the annoyance of aviation noise. The rate of change of annoyance with day-night average sound level (DNL) due to aircraft noise exposure was found to closely resemble the rate of change of loudness with sound level. The agreement of model predictions with the findings of recent curve-fitting exercises (cf. Miedma and Vos, 1998) is noteworthy, considering that other analyses have relied on different analytic methods and disparate data sets. Even though annoyance prevalence rates within individual communities consistently grow in proportion to duration-adjusted loudness, variability in annoyance prevalence rates across communities remains great. The present analyses demonstrate that 1) community-specific differences in annoyance prevalence rates can be plausibly attributed to the joint effect of acoustic and non-DNL related factors and (2) a simple model can account for the aggregate influences of non-DNL related factors on annoyance prevalence rates in different communities in terms of a single parameter expressed in DNL units-a 'community tolerance level.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]