Noise pollution indicators

Abstract

Noise is a major environmental issue, which gave birth in the last decades to extensive research and consecutively to the development of many estimation and mitigation engineering methods. The specificity of this pollution, which lies in its high spatiotemporal variations, its rich spectral component, its variety of sources, and the complexity of human hearing, explains the abundance of the existing noise indicators. Many energetic, statistical, noise event or emergence general indices have been developed. Complementing these, indicators have been produced to describe specific noise sources (road traffic, railway, aircraft…) and their resulting effects on human well-being, which makes the development of indicators directly influenced by the progress in modeling. This review shows the difficulty in finding a set of indicators able to capture both the physical characteristics of noise environments and its effects.