This master thesis investigates how two existing objective techniques could correlate with of people’s auditory cognition of ring tones, played simultaneously with a background noise. Simply expressed: Is it possible to objectively measure the threshold where a ringtone is audible to human beings in traffic noise? Two objective techniques were studied – Zwicker Loudness vs. Time and A-weighted Level vs. Time which were compared with results from a subjective listening test. The listening test itself was used as the subjective reference of which the two objective techniques were compared to.
The question was asked in what way loudness and Level could be used to simulate people’s cognitive behavior in every day situations, in this work though restricted to traffic noise. A method was proposed which could objectively analyze peak differences pointing out above the background noise. These results were then compared with the subjective data-the grading of the ring tones.
The aim with this work was to find a method that extracts what is hearable out of a background noise and use this data to grade the effectiveness of arbitrary given ring tones. Analyzing the results and the objective-subjective correlation gave us the conclusion that the proposed method was not good enough as it is constructed today. Additional refinements and perhaps more parameters have to be considered to fulfill a reliable every day working tool.