Multilevel modeling of recent community noise annoyance surveys

Large scatter in community noise annoyance survey data has recently been linked to systematic variations in noise tolerance. We hypothesize that noise tolerance is related to secondary factors, including environmental (e.g., population density, ambient noise) and attitudinal (e.g., noise sensitivity). If noise tolerance and secondary factors can be linked, the secondary factors provide a means to generalize noise annoyance from surveyed communities to non-surveyed communities. This approach would be useful for generalizing annoyance caused by quiet supersonic flight or military blast noise from a limited number of surveyed communities to other locations. A simple multilevel modeling approach (D.K. Wilson, et al. “Community noise annoyance: Connecting regression methodologies and theoretical models,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139(4), 1983 (2016)) offers a useful framework to study the relationship between noise tolerance and secondary factors. The framework has already been applied to historic survey data on transportation noise annoyance. However, the historic surveys contain limited secondary factor information. This presentation applies the multilevel modeling approach to two recent community surveys about which more secondary factors are known. The first survey was conducted on a community exposed to quiet sonic booms. The second survey was conducted on multiple communities exposed to military blast noise.