Sound quality evaluation of floor impact noise generated by walking

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Foot step noise is one of the most irritating noises in lightweight timber houses which are commonly in use in Sweden. Since irritating noise can cause stress and discomfort and has a great influence on human well-being and performance, a study was conducted on floor impact sound generated by walking, with the following objectives: - To evaluate the effects of following four factors -floor, ceiling, shoes and weight of walkers- on subjective perception and judgment of annoyance - To build a model based on the psychoacoustic descriptors and subjective judgment of annoyance. Two experiments were carried out using headphones and loudspeakers. The first experiment included 24 sounds, using 3x2x2x2 factorial design and comprising the "floor" at 3 levels and the other three factors ("ceiling", "shoes" and "weight" of the walker), each at 2 levels. In this experiment headphones and 12 subjects were employed. In experiment 2, the loudspeakers, arranged and processed through cross-talk cancellation were used instead of headphones and 16 sounds (using 2x2x2x2 factorial design) and 12 subjects were selected. Based on the results analysis, the following conclusions were derived:

1. Loudspeaker seems to be a more suitable tool than headphone to evaluate subjective response to annoyance.
2. The steel reinforced wooden type of floor when it is associated with unbolted-ceiling ("ceiling off") has higher annoyance and loudness value.
3. The role of the 250 Hz octave band seems to be very critical to analyse the floor impact sounds. Nevertheless, all octave bands from 63 to 8000 should be taken into account in order to predict the annoyance response.
4. The fixed wooden type of floor is the most appropriate type of floor in terms of less annoying when a heavier walker (male walker) is ...