Reported outdoor speech interference and event LAX

One plausible interpretation of annoyance at noise is that the annoyance arises primarily because of speech and sleep interference caused by the noise. If this is true, then it is sensible to look for relationships between activity interference and indicators of the noise from specific noisy events. Such an analysis could provide the first step toward a better understanding of the relationship between noise and annoyance. This paper describes the results of such an analysis for reported speech interference due to aircraft noise in residential areas. The event noise levels are derived from data collected during the summer of 1983 by Transport Canada's automatic monitoring system at ten locations around Toronto International Airport. For each location, this data set provided the maximum LAX and average LAX by aircraft type. The analysis relates the outdoor speech interference reported by respondents at each site to the worst case and average LAX for aircraft operations at their location, by means of a nonlinear regression. The results are compared with a similar analysis for road traffic data, to see if the same equation can serve for both types of noise source.