Measurement of Sound Pressure Level - Ocean Waves Splashing on

The Rock
Hammad Hussain
Department of Electronic System, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

1 Introduction vironmental noise sources. But there is no such thing

as a general-purpose and universally accepted noise
Environmental acoustics is a very sore subject during descriptors[5]. That’s why different countries have
these days because environmental noise is a serious adopted different noise descriptors for assessment of
health problem. World Health Organization (WHO) different community noise sources. In this study,
reported at least one million healthy years of life are we have applied four basics and mostly used noise
lost every year in Western Europe [1]just because of descriptors for the quantification of sound source.
environmental noise. In this figure, noise from indus- Which are described as follow,
trial activities is not included. The studies found di-
rect associations of environmental noise from air traf-
fic, trains, and vehicles, as well as other city sources to 2.1 Equivalent Continuous Sound
serious health conditions such as annoyance [2], cogni- Pressure Level Leq
tive impairment in children [3], sleep disturbance, tin-
nitus, and cardiovascular disease [4]. Approximately This is the preferred method to describe sound levels
16 600 premature death cases are registered every year that vary over time, resulting in a single decibel value
in Europe [3], with almost 32 million adults suffer which takes into account the total sound energy over
from the annoyance and more than 13 million adults the period of time of interest. It directly derives from
suffer from sleep disturbance [3] due to environmen- the rms value of sound pressure [5] and calculated as.
tal noise. There are a lot of sound sources in our
T
p2 (t)
Z
environment, many of them consider as an acoustics 1
Leq = 10log10 ( dt) (1)
noise source. During the study of technical acous- T 0 p20
tic course, We had chance to observe environmental
noises. We chose splashes of ocean waves as a noise
source and recorded the sounds when ocean waves 2.2 Time-Weighted Sound Level Lτ
splashed on the harbor rock. During this study, many
The time-weighted sound level is a kind of running
interesting factors have been observed like the effect
average of sound level and influenced by most recent
of wind speed and its direction and effect of tempera-
value of sound pressure. If the value of is shorter it
ture which are discussed later in this report. For the
means the influence of time interval on time-weighted
quantification of noise source, some basic noise de-
sound level is also shorter. Lτ mathematically ex-
scriptors i.e. equivalent-continuous sound levels, fast
pressed as [5];
or slow time-weighted sound levels, peak sound levels,
and maximum sound levels have been applied. This t
p2 (ξ)
Z
report structured as follows. Following the introduc- 1 t−(ξ)
Lτ = 10log10 2 exp− τ dξ (2)
tion. Section II described the experimental setup and τ −∞ p0
equipment. Section III discussed basic noise descrip-
tors. The results discussed in Section IV. The conclu- Two standards usually discussed in time-weighted
sion is summarized in Section V. sound level,

• Fast- having an exponential time constant of 125

2 Noise Descriptors
Noise from different sources can be described or mea-
sured in different ways. Even one particular type of
noise source can be described or measured in many
alternative ways. Scientists have conducted surveys
and laboratory studies aiming to develop descriptors
to best correlate community response to various en-
ms, corresponding approximately to the integra-
tion time of the ear (sounds of duration less than
around 125 ms do not register their full loudness
with the average human subject).
• Slow- having an exponential time constant of 1 s
to allow for the average level to be estimated by
eye with greater precision.
 2
2.3 Maximum sound Level Lmax
Lmax is calculated by simply measuring the maximum
value of time-weighted sound level [5].

Lmax = maxLτ (3)

2.4 Peak sound Level Lpeak

The peak sound pressure (P, measured in Pascals)
is the greatest absolute value of the instantaneous
(non-time-weighted) sound pressure during a partic-
ular time interval and calculated as [5];

p2peak
Lpeak = 10log10 (4) Figure 1: Experimental Setup at Skansen Gjestehavn
p20
Harbour, Trondheim, Central Norway.

3 Experimental Setup
The study reported here was conducted at the
Skansen Gjestehavn Harbour, Trondheim, Central
Norway, on 7 September 2019. The experimental
setup for this study shown in Fig.1.The duration of
the experiment was approximately 1 hour, in be-
tween 20:30 hrs. to 21:30 hrs. The recorded tem-
perature at the starting of the experiment was 10°C
Figure 2: Experimental Geometry
and 8°C at the end of the experiment. The recorded
maximum wind speed during experiment was 8 m/s
gentle breeze from east. The distance between the Figure 4,5,6,7 and 8 clearly shown the variations in
source and the receiver was approximately 3.5m and the noise descriptors when different time-weighted
the height of the receiver from the source is approxi- mode have been applied.The peaks of the noise de-
mately 1.2m. The experimental geometry is shown in scriptors shown the effects when ocean waves strike
Fig.2. The condenser microphone and the H5 zoom with harbour rock. The effects of temperature and
handy recorder have been used for the recording. The wind speed on noise descriptors are also clearly shown
condenser mic has connected with the 1/2 inputs of in the figures.
the recorder, shown in Fig.3. The recorder was cal-
ibrated at 94 dB before and after the recording. In
the post-processing A-weighted filter has applied for References
frequency-weighting and measured the equivalent con-
[1] WHO, 2011, Burden of disease from environmental
tinuous sound pressure Level ,time-weighted sound
noise — Quantification of healthy life years lost in Eu-
level in different modes, maximum sound level and
rope, World Health Organization Regional Office for
peak sound level Europe, Copenhagen.

4 Results
The duration of the experiment was approximately
one hour, to observed the effect of temperature and
wind on the noise source we divided this experiment
into three parts.

• First Starting 20 seconds of experiment, At 10°C

temperature and the wind speed was 5m/s.

• Middle 20 seconds of experiment, At 9°C temper-

ature and the wind speed was 8m/s.

• Last 20 seconds of experiment, At 8°C tempera-

ture and the wind speed was 7m/s. Figure 3: Condenser Microphone and Recorder
 3

Figure 4: First 20 Seconds of Experiment, Time- Figure 6: Middle 20 Seconds of Experiment, Time-
weighted mode ”SLOW” weighted mode ”SLOW

Figure 5: First 20 Seconds of Experiment, Time- Figure 7: Middle 20 Seconds of Experiment, Time-
weighted mode ”FAST” weighted mode ”FAST
 4
[2] European Environment Agency, “Population exposure
to environmental noise” (2017).
[3] ETC-ACM, 2016, Blanes N, Fons J, Houthuijs D,
Swart W, de la Maza MS, Ramos MJ, et al., Noise in
Europe 2017: updated assessment., European Topic
Centre on Air Pollution and Climate Change Mitiga-
tion (ETC/ACM), Bilthoven, The Netherlands.
[4] Birger Plovsing, Proposal for Nordtest Method:
Nord2000 – Prediction Outdoor Sound Propagation,
AV 1106/07, DELTA, 27 March 2007, revised 13 Jan-
uary 2014.
[5] G. Dutilleux, : Lecture on Environmental Acoustics.
Department of Electronic System, NTNU, 2018.

Figure 8: Last 20 Seconds of Experiment, Time-

weighted mode ”SLOW

Figure 9: Last 20 Seconds of Experiment, Time-

weighted mode ”FAST