Subjective responses between real impact sound and rubber ball im-pact sound

Abstract

By the recent COVID-19 situation, people stay more time in their home and abatements on noise between neighbouring units are increasing. Heavy/soft impact sound is one of the major noise sources in high-rise apartment buildings. Standardized heavy/soft impact source is known for having the most similar physical and subjective characteristics with real impact sound such as a child running, jumping and an adult walking. The single number quantity on the rubber ball was standardized. A classification scheme for rubber ball impact sound needs to be standardized. Several studies on subjective responses were conducted on rubber ball impact sound in various situations. In this study, subjective responses on the rubber impact sound and real impact sound were compared. The subjective experiment was conducted in the listening chamber which is furnished similarly to the typical living room of Korean apartment buildings. In the experiment, rubber ball impact sounds recorded in the real apartment building and real impact sound recorded in the mock-up building were presented through a sub-woofer and multi-channel loudspeaker system. Subjective responses were collected with an 11 points SD scale.