Noise Monitoring System Employing Psychoacoustic Noise Dosimetry

Bozena Kostek

New ways of assessing noise-induced harmful effects on human hearing system were presented at the 126th AES Convention. They resulted from a long-term study allowing authors to define new indicators that were proposed on the basis of hearing examination done in the real noise exposure situations. However, it seems now that the topic was raised prematurely at that time (in 2009), because it did not entail any discussion on this matter in the AES community.  Meanwhile, the authors continued their work on this subject. Consequently, the mentioned new ideas were disseminated in some following papers and an advanced distributed noise monitoring system was implemented employing the conceived psychoacoustic noise dosimetry. The proposed noise exposure indicators are reviewed in the present paper.  The practical applicability of the proposed indicators were confirmed experimentally using hearing testing with real noise exposures and also on the basis of simulation results employing some standard test signals.