ASSESSING AURAL COMFORT OF HIGH-RISE APARTMENT DWELLERS IN THE TROPICS

Abstract

Noise is recognized as a key quality of life issue in the modern urban environment. In a dense high-rise environment with its hot and humid tropical climate, the need for natural ventilation in residential buildings poses significant challenges in achieving aural comfort in the indoor environment. Aural comfort in 'tropical high-rise environment' is different from that in a temperate urban zone. Consequently there is a need to redefine the context of 'aural comfort' in the presence of high-rise built environment in a tropical climatic condition. This research study endeavours to evaluating of daytime 'Aural comfort' among the high-rise apartment dwellers in tropical Singapore.

In this thesis, a novel framework is proposed for the evaluation of aural comfort which is rooted in Stallen¿s (1999) theory of noise annoyance and based on the profound theory of Evaluation Response Model (ERM) (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993). The proposed evaluation framework includes objective and subjective evaluation of aural comfort. Data collected from objective and subjective evaluation were analyzed statistically and integrated to establish the 'experience' of the residents in terms of their long term daytime aural comfort in their dwellings. This resulted in the development of an Aural Comfort Model (ACM). The developed model has established that indoor aural comfort is dependent on the noise exposure level, the subjective perceptions of apartments' noisiness due to noise exposure, the level of subjective disturbances due to road traffic noise and also the perceived noise disturbance due to MRT train noise. The aural comfort model was validated using subjective comfort responses collected from psychoacoustical experiments in controlled laboratory condition. The predicted aural comfort levels based on experimental data (using ACM) were in good agreement with the collected subjective responses from the laboratory experiment. Parametric studies were carried out to investigate the factors in the model to establish their relationships with different psycho-acoustical quantities and are discussed in this thesis .