Development of schemes to gauge the annoyance of time-varying sound

Hard disk drives (HDDs) nowadays have use in many diverse applications. Examples include various types of consumer electronic devices that operate in extremely quiet environments and personal computers that integrate the HDD and other peripherals within the display very close to the user. Higher exposure to the HDD sound, either due to the lack of masking sound or close proximity to the user, require establishment of a scheme to identify features within the sound to decide on its acceptability. This paper describes an effort aimed at developing a scheme for identification of attention-grabbing or annoying features within time-varying sound that would point to its unacceptability by a typical user. In this first part, sample sounds were examined based on their perceived strength (loudness), duration, repetition rate, and higher order statistics to acceptability based on a jury study.