PreWinT - Prediction and Mitigation of Wind-Turbine Noise and Its Impact on Humans

This work package investigates how wind turbine noise (WTN) affects humans, emphasizing both acoustic and non-acoustic contributors to annoyance. Among the non-acoustic contributors, both social, situational, and physical factors will be considered. Recognizing that long-term average noise levels alone do not capture the complexity of noise annoyance, WP1 employs two main strategies to improve our understanding of WTN’s subjective impacts on individuals:

• Field surveys will follow ISO/TS 1566641 using standardized noise-reaction questions, implemented as random-sample telephone interviews (target n≈300 respondents per “community”) to produce high-annoyance vs Lden data pairs.
• Enable Community Tolerance Level (CTL) estimation per ISO 1996-1:201642 .

Laboratory Experiments to isolate and measure the influence of specific acoustic characteristics (e.g., amplitude modulation, tonality). Listening tests in controlled rooms will vary AM depth and tonality; results will be used to refine dose–response functions and cross-validate CTL-derived ERFs. 

This will be done through the following tasks:

• T1.1 Social Surveys 
• T1.2 Laboratory Studies 
• T1.3 Monetization of Noise Annoyance