Experimental study on hearing thresholds for low-frequency pure tones

Abstract

To investigate the effect of wind turbine noise, a study project has been conducted in the three years from fiscal year 2010 under the sponsorship of the Ministry of the Environment, Japan. One of the key aims in this study was to examine the effects of low-frequency components contained in wind turbine noise, and a series of auditory experiments have been conducted using an experimental facility composed of two adjacent rooms, where low-frequency sounds down to infrasound frequency range could be produced. As the first experiment using this facility, human hearing thresholds for pure tones were examined in the frequency range from 10 Hz to 200 Hz with 97 participants in a wide age range from 20 to 60 years.