Connecting High-Power Jet Noise Characteristics with Human Annoyance

The proposed effort will correlate perceptual features and physical source characteristics of high-powered military jet noise with human loudness judgments and corresponding annoyance. Tactical military aircraft noise evokes significant community response because of its high amplitudes and unique features, such as shock content perceived as crackle and low-frequency rumble. During Phase II, candidate specialized metrics and processing tools developed in Phase I will be used to generate test signals from jet noise databases for listener experiments. These experiments will quantify subjective response to tactical jet noise with the specialized metrics. Furthermore, noise monitoring studies are planned to evaluate the magnitude and variability of these specialized metrics measured from real flight operations. To improve ability to extract perceptually significant noise features from jet source characterization, Phase-I acoustic array processing will be further extended with analysis from current jet noise datasets and optimized for future measurements. The results lay the foundation for quantifying source and field features that impact human perception, improving prediction of community noise impacts and guiding future noise models, data collection, and noise mitigation efforts. Additionally, algorithms developed for specialized metric calculation will be packaged for integration into sound level meters and sound quality analysis software.