The psychoacoustics annoyance research based on EEG rhythms for passengers in high-speed railway

Abstract Passengers’ psychoacoustics annoyance in the rail system is an awareness factor. It would be associated with rail services development and optimization. At present, the interior acoustics only measured and considered under the A-weighted sound pressure level (dBA), and have less consideration on passengers’ feelings. Therefore, it is necessary to apply a method for passengers’ psychoacoustics annoyance evaluation. Zwicker’s model has put forward the evaluation of psychoacoustic annoyance based on human hearing systems. Moreover, researchers have indicated that human brain activities and mental states can be reflected by the variation of sub-bands in electroencephalograph (EEG) under acoustics exposure. Therefore, the EEG sub-bands can be introduced for evaluating psychoacoustics annoyance on passengers. This study compares the interior acoustics in rail vehicles by Zwicker’s model and proposes the new EEG psychoacoustic annoyance indices to calculate the passengers’ psychoacoustics annoyance with EEG sub-bands under rail acoustics exposure. The loudness, sharpness and roughness of Zwicker’s model are analysed. The validation of this index and the comparison existing features have been made from the experiment carried on the high-speed train. Moreover, the correlation coefficients have been made between Zwicker’s model parameters and EEG indices. The results suggested the proposed index has good performance and can reflect the passengers’ psychoacoustics annoyance in high-speed rail.