Effects of active noise control on auditory impression and brain activity of the off-target sounds

Abstract

The influence of active noise control (ANC) on auditory impression for listening to a music other than a noise was observed by psychological measurement and magnetoencephalography (MEG) in a situation where both a noise and non-target sounds were mixed. 15-stimuli conditions were produced by applying 5- levels of ANC to three kinds of classical musics. In the psychological measurement, adverse effects of ANC were observed for the music with the lowest spectral centroid. Further, MEG measurement were carried out for this music and autocorrelation function (ANC) of spontaneous responses were estimated. Significant increases of the effective duration of the ACF, τe, were observed for the non-preferred conditions in the low-γ activities, indicating the increase of cognitive processing load on a subject for non-preferred conditions.