The influence of audio-visual interactions on the annoyance ratings for wind turbines Malina Szychowska a,⇑ , Honorata Hafke-Dys a , Anna Preis a , Je˛ drzej Kocin´ ski a , Pawel Kleka b a Institute of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan´, Umultowska 85, 61-614 Poznan´, Poland b Institute of Psychology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan´, Szamarzewskiego 89AB, 60-568 Poznan´, Poland article info Article history: Received 10 January 2017 Received in revised form 14 July 2017 Accepted 1 August 2017 Keywords: Wind turbines noise Transportation noise Annoyance Recognition Audio-visual interactions abstract Annoyance has a negative influence on health and well-being, and over a longer time, it can increase the risk of stress, sleep disturbance, obesity and even heart attacks. The aim of this paper was to investigate the influence of audio-visual information on the assessment of annoyance caused by wind turbines. Seven soundscapes and seven landscapes were presented to 44 participants in an anechoic chamber with an ambisonic set up of 25 + 1 loudspeakers, and a large sound-permeable screen for visual presentation. First, participants were presented with auditory samples and asked to rate the noise annoyance on the ICBEN scale. Subsequently, they were asked to identify the sound sources. Second, participants were pre- sented with visual samples and asked to rate their annoyance. Last, participants were presented with audio-visual mixes and again asked to rate their annoyance. The obtained results suggest that sound level of auditory presentation was the most influential factor in the annoyance assessment. The second most influential factor was the presented visual sample, and the least influential factor was the presented audio samples. Recognition of wind turbines tended to increase the annoyance ratings of the small wind turbines audio sample. Moreover, the participants who recognized the wind turbine also tended to rate the transportation samples as more annoying, but not the natural-like samples. In general, the audio and audio-visual samples of wind turbines were assessed similarly to the transportation samples, but not to the natural-like samples. Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Imagine sitting in the garden, resting after a hard day’s work. During that relaxing time, you are probably exposed to many dif- ferent types of noise, as always in the everyday life. One of them stands out – it is relatively quiet and repetitive, with amplitude and frequency modulations. What is more, somewhere on the hori- zon you can see wind turbines – these huge, white towers, with three rather quickly rotating blades, in stark contrast with the green, natural landscape. What do you think would annoy you more – the noise, the view, or maybe a combination of both? Wind turbines are relatively new sound sources in the environ- ment. Their noise is periodical, and amplitude and frequency mod- ulated; and although one might expect them to be really loud, wind turbines actually generate fairly low noise levels. Neverthe- less, people living in the vicinity of wind turbines often complain about how annoying they are – even more annoying than any other noise sources [1–4]. It is a common practice in field research to use questionnaires, distributed amongst people living close to wind turbines, to collect their ratings of noise annoyance [5]. The results of these questionnaires suggest that, besides loudness [3,4,6–8], the following factors might influence the annoyance rating of wind turbines: amplitude modulation [9], low-frequency content [10,11], attitude towards wind turbines [2,3,6], economic benefits [1,3], information from other senses [1–3,6,8], and recognition [12]. Human perception is multisensory – all the senses simultane- ously and incessantly send information to our brain, where it is merged, integrated, processed and analysed together. In a labora- tory setting it is possible to almost completely eliminate informa- tion coming from some senses. However, in real life, a healthy person never relies on one sense alone. People who are awake receive information from all the senses all the time, even if they are not aware of that. Recently, many studies have taken into account the interaction between the senses, and more research is being conducted on multimodal perception. The investigation of the two most dominant senses – vision and audition is particularly interesting. Several basic audio-visual interactions, such as the http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2017.08.003 0003-682X/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author at: Gösta Ekman Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail address: malina.szychowska@psychology.su.se (M. Szychowska). Applied Acoustics 129 (2018) 190–203 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Acoustics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apacoust