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Description
Short-term annoyance caused by wind turbine noise (WTN) was examined under controlled laboratory conditions, focusing on some acoustic and non-acoustic factors. Forty-five participants were exposed to WTN stimuli stemming from in-situ recordings. Annoyance ratings were gathered alongside individual measures of noise sensitivity and attitude toward wind turbines. Various acoustic factors were investigated from the stimuli, such as sound intensity, amplitude fluctuation, and low-frequency content. The relative contribution to annoyance of the studied acoustic and non-acoustic factors was assessed using multilevel regression modeling. All multilevel models built included noise sensitivity and attitude toward wind turbines at the individual level. Among the acoustic and psychoacoustic indices, LAeq emerged as the dominant variable. However, metrics capturing amplitude fluctuations—such as roughness and the temporal derivative of loudness—provided additional explanatory value beyond sound level alone. In contrast, the contribution of the IOA amplitude modulation metric was minor. Low-frequency energy, highlighted by specific loudness integrated between 2 and 4 Barks, was also significantly related to annoyance, though its influence remained moderate.