Study of the impact of aircraft noise on annoyance and cognitive task performance regarding the distance from the airport
Résumé
Aviation traffic is expected to increase by 30% by 2025. Aircraft noise annoyance of people living near airports is one of the parameters which could limit this industry. Indeed, occurrence of flights takes part in noise annoyance. In addition to non-acoustic factors, acoustic parameters such as noise level or temporal and spectral aspects are involved in annoyance. In this study, two assumptions are studied: (1) close to the airport, the emergence of the flyovers constitutes the most important parameter, (2) far from the airport, this is the flyover duration. This paper presents a perceptive experiment which aims at verifying these assumptions, questioning about short term annoyance in laboratory. Three sequences of aircraft noise have been recorded at three different distances from the airport. Short term annoyance after each sound sequence has been assessed by about 50 participants. During the experiment, cognitive tasks were performed: (1) the reading of a text presented on a computer screen equipped with an eye tracker in order to measure the velocity of reading and the number of retro-saccades, (2) a memorization task where the performance is assessed with the number of errors and the reaction time. The acoustic characteristics, perceived annoyance and performance measurements are then crossed. The results are presented and discussed in this paper.