An overview of concepts and past findings on noise events and human response to surface transport noise

Noise events are well established in the measurement and management of aircraft noise. While there have been attempts to apply similar noise-event concepts to road and rail traffic noise signals for many decades, the idea has remained largely peripheral to the current paradigm of surface traffic noise measurement, assessment and management. The latter is based, almost exclusively, on metrics that utilize integrated energy of the traffic noise signal, or exceedance levels. This paper, as an introduction to a session that focuses on noise events from transportation noise, provides an overview of concepts and past findings on human responses of annoyance and interference with human activities, including sleep disturbance, that have been related to noise events and other pattern measures of the noise from surface traffic flows.