Acoustic annoyance inside aircraft cabins - A listening test approach

The Speech Interference Level 3H (LSIL) is widely used for the evaluation of the acoustic comfort aboard jet-engine aircrafts. The aim of this study is to explore the potential of LSIL to represent the acoustic annoyance of sounds inside aircraft cabins and to compare its performance to LAeq and loudness. In a listening test, 21 untrained listeners had to rate the annoyance of 15 real noise samples. The ratings are mapped to a relative annoyance scale and compared to the corresponding LSIL, LAeq and loudness values. The results show that LSIL does not represent annoyance. LSIL yields a correlation of only 0.58, while LAeq and loudness yield correlations of 0.8 and 0.93, respectively. Therefore, loudness seems to be a useful parameter for evaluating the acoustic comfort in aircraft cabins.