Investigation into the Effect of Horizontal Source Direction on Psychoacoustic Annoyance

A limited number of studies have explored the impact of spatial acoustic features on perceived annoyance. Existing auditory annoyance models do not consider spatial features and are restricted to mono audio signals. A listening experiement has been carried out to investigate the effect of horizontal source direction on the subjective annoyance caused by a series commonly occurring domestic sounds. 7 source recordings were presented binaurally, positioned at 45° intervals surrounding the listener. The perceived annoyance caused by each stimulus was graded by 54 participants. The results indicated that for most sources, the lowest annoyance level was reported when the source was situated at 180°, and the highest when poistioned at +/-90°. This confirms the hypothesis that source direction affects perceived annoyance level. However, this appears to be dependent on source type, with several sources demonstrating no significant differences in preceived annoyance across the tested source positions. Differences in perceived annoyance were also observed depending on whether the sources were presented in a simulated reverberant or anechoic space. The findings of this study will serve as the basis for the development of a spatially-weighted psychoacoustic annoyance model.