Recent Developments in Investigating and Understanding Impact Sound Annoyance—A Literature Review

Impact sound, particularly prevalent indoors, emerges as a major source of annoyance necessitating a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of its implications. This literature review provides a systematic overview of recent research developments in the study of impact sound annoyance, focusing on advances in the assessment of impact sound perception through laboratory listening testing and standardization efforts. This review provides a detailed summary of the listening setup, assessment procedure and key findings of each study. The studied correlations between SNQs and annoyance ratings are summarized and key research challenges are highlighted. Among the studies, considerable research effort has focused on the assessment of walking impact sound and the use of spectrum adaptation terms, albeit with inconsistent outcomes. Comparison with the previous literature also shows the influence of spatial and temporal characteristics of impact sound sources on perceived annoyance, with higher spatial fidelity leading to higher annoyance ratings. Furthermore, it has been shown that the consideration of non-acoustic factors such as noise sensitivity and visual features are important for the assessment. This review provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in the understanding and assessment of impact sound annoyance and provides information for future research directions and standardization efforts.