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Description
Impulsive components can substantially increase noise annoyance, motivating the inclusion of impulse penalties in environmental noise assessment. While existing research and impulse penalty procedures mainly focus on level- and onset-related characteristics, the roles of the spectral content of impulses and temporal irregularity of impulse occurrences have received less attention. To explore these aspects further, this study investigated how selected impulse characteristics affect perceived impulsiveness and annoyance in a controlled laboratory experiment. Thirty participants rated synthetically generated stimuli with impulses systematically varied in level difference, onset rate, irregularity, and spectral content of the impulse. Ratings were compared with model predictions to assess the explanatory power of different approaches. For the stimuli considered in this study, a more complex method incorporating onset-related characteristics provided the most accurate prediction of perceived impulsiveness, whereas a loudness-based metric predicted annoyance well. A simple level percentile-based approach predicted both well. Level difference and the spectral content had statistically significant effects on both rating criteria, while onset rate and regular vs. irregular impulse occurrences showed no significant influence. However, methodological constraints, particularly difficulties in impulse-level scaling and loudness differences between the impulses due to the different spectral content, limit generalizability of the observed effects. The study thus provides relevant considerations for future experiments and highlights the potential roles of psychoacoustic loudness and onset detection in modelling perceived impulsiveness.