Loudness and Annoyance
A great achievement of psychoacoustics has been the devel- opment of a scale of loudness, which is the perception of the strength of a sound. The loudness of tones was studied in the US by Fletcher and Munson2 and in the UK by Churcher and King.3 This work was then extended to the loudness of bands of noise and much more complex sounds. As a result there are computational algorithms or metrics for loudness that work extremely well for calculating and predicting how people will perceive the loudness of all kinds of sounds.