Annoyance of helicopter-like sounds in urban background noise

Scenarios of urban air mobility see electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs) operating within cities. Rotorcraft sounds are typically characterised by short bursts of noise, although eVTOLs offer more opportunities for a quieter sound design. We asked participants to compare the annoyance of a reference sequence of bursts of noise with a burst duration of 20 ms with that of a test sequence for which the burst duration was 1 or 5 ms. There were 20 bursts/s. A two-interval, two-alternative forced-choice task and a 1-up/1-down procedure was used. Both sequences were played in background noise that had either the same root-mean-square (RMS) level as the sequence of bursts or 10 dB less. The results were similar to those for loudness: On average, sequences with 1-ms bursts needed 6-7 dB less RMS level to sound equally annoying as the 20-ms bursts, and sequences with 5-ms bursts needed 3 dB less. This suggests that psychoacoustic annoyance is mainly explained by loudness and that the RMS level is an insufficient descriptor. Compared between the two background noise levels, the level difference for equal annoyance between short and 20-ms bursts was 1.5 dB larger in the louder background, which was statistically significant.