The psychological impacts of the noise in an air-conditioning building environment on occupants

An air-conditioning ventilation system is an essential component of buildings to maintain a good indoor environmental quality. A design of a ventilation system should minimize the negative noise impacts on occupants. However, researchers found that multi-dimensional psychological impacts could be created by but only the sound level but also the spectral and temporal content of the environmental noise. Therefore, a multi-dimensional approach will be applied in this study. The objective characteristics of the noise will be assessed by a list of acoustic and psychoacoustic metrics. The subjective psychological impact of the noise will be assessed by a psychometric tool, called psychoacoustics perception scale (PPS). Moreover, a letter cancellation task (LCT) will also be applied to test the noise effects on the degree of the occupants’ attention. The statistical analysis result showed that the psychological impacts of the noise on human sensitivity to the magnitude was affected by the distance from the outlet of the ventilation system. The psychological impacts of the noise on human sensation of the temporal and spectral compositions were affected by the change of ventilation mode. Moreover, the psychological impact of the noise on occupants was also found to be significantly correlated to occupants’ score of attention.