Acoustic comfort of air-treatment systems: influence of factors related to room acoustics

This study aims at de ning reliable acoustic cues for the measure, characterization and prediction of the acoustic comfort of air-treatment systems (ATS). To meet customers' expectations, industrial products tend increasingly to follow a process of "sound design". In this process, the perceptual evaluation of sound quality is a necessary step to de ne acoustic speci cations. Nonetheless, the possible in uence of factors related to room acoustics is often neglected. Contextual parameters, such as room acoustics' factors, should be integrated in the evaluation of sound quality in order to de ne acoustic comfort as it is perceived in a real environment. First, a sound corpus of a reasonable size was constituted through a categorization experiment over a large recording database of di erent types of ATS. Then, an experiment was conducted to build a scale of acoustic comfort over the sound corpus and relevant acoustic features for prediction were identi ed. Two di erent situations were considered: diotic presentation and auralized presentation (using a 3D vector base amplitude panning system), the results of which were nally compared in order to address the relative importance of room acoustics' factors for the judgement of the acoustic comfort of ATS.