Press Release
25th of April is International Noise Awareness Day!
Noise annoys - always and everybody to the same extent?
Europe-wide survey on noise annoyance and noise sensitivity
Do you feel, in this very moment, annoyed by noise from your environment?
The response depends on one hand on the loudness of your environment and on
the other hand on your personal noise sensitivity. Researchers at the Leibniz
Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors at Dortmund University
(IfADo) focus on these individual differences
in the framework of a European research network 'SILENCE'.
"With the help of our internet questionnaire we want to learn, how sensitive
people are to noise in various everyday situations, how they experience traffic
noise in their residential area and which for them is the most annoying source
of noise," explains Barbara Griefahn, Professor at the IfADo
and the head of this project. Each participant in this questionnaire, which
is available under www.ifado.de/SILENCE,
receives a feedback on his/her personal profile on noise sensitivity. The questionnaire
is anonymuous, however, information on the address of the participant would
enable the scientists to link the individual noise experience with the sources
and the levels of noises in the residential area. The aim of the research network
SILENCE, which exists since 2005, is to develop recommendations and rules for
noise abatement. For this the scientists focus their interest particularly on
annoying noise components of vehicles and other influences of traffic noise
on annoyance.
"Therefore the people exposed to noise who are the very experts for noise on man should have a say. We want to understand how people perceive noise and what they think is necessary for noise abatement," says Professor Barbara Griefahn, "and we want to collect the information all over Europe, therefore this survey is conducted in several European countries."
The website for the internet questionnaire is www.ifado.de/silence
Contact: Dirk Schreckenberg, phone: +49 231 1084 232, email:
Please find sound examples of different traffic noises (freight and regional train, car and lorry traffic) here for downloading. These sounds may be used for broadcasting only in relation to this SILENCE-survey. All rights remain at IfADo.