Measuring the exposure to sound samples in subjective experiments

Traditional measures of environmental noise exposure concentrate on time and power (e.g. Ldn). For short measurements, time is, however, of secondary importance and the approach may come up with misleading results. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on short-term dose values evaluated along the playing time of the sound samples, to solve this problem. A comprehensive study on potentially influencing factors is carried out, discussing the partitioning method for short-term period analysis, the statistical treatment of the short-term dose values and four different frequency weightings. Eleven indices are then used to measure the exposure of the fixed duration sound sample. This lays the groundwork for the dose-annoyance relationship via subjective experiments.