Preferred levels of auditory danger signals

An important issue at the design stage of the auditory danger signal for a safety system is the signal audibility under various conditions of background noise. The auditory danger signal should be clearly audible but it should not be too loud to avoid fright, startling effects, and nuisance complaints. Criteria for designing auditory danger signals are the subject of the ISO 7731 (International Organization for Standardization [ISO], 1986) international standard and the EN 457 European standard (European Committee for Standardization [CEN], 1992). It is required that the A-weighted sound pressure level of the auditory danger signal is higher in level than the background noise by 15 dB. In this paper, the results of an experiment are reported, in which listeners adjusted most preferred levels of 3 danger signals (tone, sweep, complex sound) in the presence of a noise background (pink noise and industrial noise). The measurements were done for 60-, 70-, 80-, and 90-dB A-weighted levels of noise. Results show that for 60-dB level of noise the most preferred level of the danger signal is 10 to 20 dB above the noise level. However, for 90-dB level of noise, listeners selected a level of the danger signal that was equal to the noise level. Results imply that the criterion in the existing standards is conservative as it requires the level of the danger signal to be higher than the level of noise regardless of the noise level.