Relationship between loudness and annoyance for ten community sounds

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the relationship between perceived annoyance and perceived loudness for complex community sounds. The two perceptual attributes were scaled by the method of magnitude estimation. In all, forty subjects scaled ten different tape recorded sounds presented at two different Zwicker loudness values. The results show that for physically loud sounds only the perceived annoyance may be exchanged for perceived loudness, while for physically soft sounds, the perceived annoyance deviates greatly from perceived loudness. Thus, for physically soft sounds, more attention is paid to other aspects of the sound, such as the perceptual counterpart of the physical parameter sharpness, than to the loudness-related sound pressure level. This means that the physically determined Zwicker loudness is inappropriate to use for predicting the perceived annoyance of complex sounds.