Audio-visual interaction of environmental noise Anna Preis a) , Honorata Hafke-Dys b) , Malina Szychowska c) ,Jędrzej Kociński d) and Jan Felcyn e) (Received: 9 June 2015; Revised: 3 January 2016; Accepted: 3 January 2016) Currently research into the psychological evaluation of noise in daily life is car- ried out without taking into account the sense of sight. The human senses interact with each other; thus some information coming from one sense can be skipped or ignored in favor of information coming from another sense, leading to completely different reactions or behavior. The aim of this paper is toverify, on the basis of psychophysical experiments, how a human being processes audio-visual informa- tion coming from the different environmental noises which can be encountered in daily life. The experiment was divided into three parts: auditory, visual, and audio-visual. In each part of the experiment, the ICBEN scale (0–10) was used to rate the presented stimuli. In the first part only audio stimuli were pre- sented, and subjects were asked to rate their annoyance with the sound. In the second part of the experiment, the participants were asked to rate how pleasant the presented video clips were. Finally, in the last part of the experiment, parti- cipants were presented with a compatible and incompatible mix of audio and visual stimuli and asked to rate their annoyance. We found that several audio stimuli were assessed differently, to a significant extent, by listeners after video clips were added to them. © 2016 Institute of Noise Control Engineering. Primary subject classification: 63.7; Secondary subject classification: 63.1 1 INTRODUCTION There is growing evidence showing the audio-visual in- teraction of noise in the environment. In daily life it may hap- pen that a given sound source is heard but not seen, or the same sound source is perceived in a different visual setting. In the literature, the first problem is known as the influ- ence of the visibility of the sound source on subjective noise annoyance assessment. Bangjun et al. 1 wanted to find out whether the visibility of the source of noise in similar acoustic environments can affect the level of noise annoy- ance. He proved that when the sound source cannot be seen, the noise annoyance is lower than when compared to the situation where both audio and visual information is available. In contrast, Maffei et al. 2 analyzed how the visual characteristics of a screen can influence the noise perception of local residents. In the case of transparent bar- riers where sound sources were seen, perceived annoyance, as well as perceived loudness, were judged lower than when compared to the situations in which the sound sources were not seen (industrial, opaque or green barriers, see also Aylor and Marks 3 ). Sound source visibility is partly involved in studying the influence of recognition on noise annoyance caused by a given sound source. If we are unable to identify the sound source based on audio information alone, then adding visual information solves this problem. In their study, Van Renterghem et al. 4 concluded that when the sub- jects could not identify the sound source, they assessed it differently to when the picture of the sound source was shown and they could easily recognize it. There are also interesting findings regarding the environ- mental context of audio-visual interactions. Carles et al. 5 and Maf fiolo et al. 6 showed that the sounds of nature influ- ence our assessment of a landscape. On the other hand, be- ing in green areas could result in better assessment of the acoustical nature of an evaluated area (Gidlöf-Gunnarsson and Öhrström 7 ). Also adding visual information to natural sounds, such as the sounds of birds or frogs, can enhance the subjective evaluation of the environment (Tsai and Lai 8 ). The second problem relates to the noise annoyance assessment of different audio-visual stimuli combinations. In these combinations, visual information was either associ- ated or unassociated with sound (as in Cox's study 9 ) or matched or unmatched with audio information (as in our a) Institute of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, POLAND; email: apraton@amu.edu.pl. b) Institute of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, POLAND; email: honorata.hafke@ gmail.com. c) Institute of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, POLAND; email: mszychowska@ gmail.com. d) Institute of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, POLAND; email: jen@amu.edu.pl. e) Institute of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, POLAND; email: janaku@amu.edu.pl. 34 Noise Control Engr. J. 64 (1), January-February 2016 Published by INCE/USA in conjunction with KSNVE