Annoyance response to recorded aircraft noise. I. Effect of intensity of illumination.

Normal-hearing adults aged 19--49 yrs watched TV in a simulated living room and made magnitude estimations of the annoyance of each of 27 levels of noise from 83.9 to 91.8 dbA. Each item was a simulated flyover of an aircraft presented from 4 loudspeakers each outside one of the upper corners of the room. The 27 items were all presented in each of 3 sessions (counterbalanced across groups of 4 S) under room illumination of 21.53 lumens/sg m (i.e., "normal" room illumination), and 2.69 ("dim") and 129.17 ("bright") illumination. Split-half reliabilities indicated that Ss can make reliable responses in these conditions. The intercept of the regression lines of annoyance on noise levels significantly differed, and the slopes tended to differ, among the illumination conditions; indicating that the annoyance may grow more rapidly with increasing noise level under dim than normal illumination. Data predicted that annoyance reduction, which may be equivalent to 5 db attenuation, is obtained when normal illumination is reduced to dim. Similarly, judged annoyance tended to differ between bright and normal illumination.