4. Conclusion

Despite all the work carried out to establish these indicators, they must be treated with caution when it comes to building an amenity model. Zwicker et al. have proposed universal indicators supposed to represent the annoyance of any sound, and calculated from the elementary indicators outlined above. Of course, these indicators should be treated with caution, for two reasons. Firstly, they assume that the elementary indicators have good precision, which, as we have seen, is not true at least for roughness. Secondly, they totally disregard the significance that noise can have, which can strongly influence its assessment.

You should also be very cautious about the approaches proposed by some manufacturers of perceptual analysis software. This approach consists in conducting a perceptual test and calculating the whole battery of available indicators (of which this...