Indoor human response to blast sounds that generate rattles

The two major noise sources that cause environmental problems for the U. S. Army are helicopters and large weapons such as artillery, tanks, and demolition. These large weapons produce blast sounds that contain little energy above 200 Hz and that are particularly troublesome to deal with because they excite rattles in structures. The purpose of this study was to systematically test subjective response to the presence or absence of rattles in otherwise similar blast sound environments. A second purpose of the study was to test if there were structural changes that could reduce annoyance within the indoor blast sound environment. This study was done using a specially constructed test house and highly repeatable shake table to generate the blast sounds. The data clearly show that no commonly used environmental noise measure adequately describes the indoor environment when the blast excites rattles. Although the indoor blast ASEL changes by only about a decibel or so (and the indoor blast CSEL changes by even less), the subjective response changes by up to 13 dB. At low blast levels, the increase in human annoyance response is largest, and this annoyance response offset decreases to about 6 dB when the outside, flat-weighted peak sound-pressure level of the blast increases from 112 to 122 dB.