Psychoacoustic Parameters and Variations in Annoyance Perception: An EEG-based Study

Studies have indicated that prolonged exposure to unwanted acoustic stimuli can trigger noise annoyance. Large engines are prevalent in industrial and traffic settings, but their high performance often comes with significant radiated noise emissions, leading to relevant staff members’ annoyance. Traditional evaluations, for example psychoacoustic parameters, of noise annoyance fail to adequately account for the physiological processes involved in sound perception. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals can provide insights into the physiological responses to external acoustic stimuli. Here, we design an experimental paradigm to capture EEG signals and extract spectral and brain’s functional connectivity features when the participants evaluate the annoyance of diesel engine radiated noise samples. The correlation between spectral features and subjective annoyance shows that the delta and alpha bands’ relative power could reflect noise annoyance. Delta-band brain network analysis inferred those differences in exogenous temporal attention networks’ threshold, about 30%, result in variations in noise annoyance perception.