As a brief introduction of administrative legislation and regulation for environmental noise problems in Japan, the legal system is firstly listed and the contents of the representative laws and standards are summarized.They are the Noise Regulation Law, Environmental Impact Assessment Law, and Environmental Standards for Noise.With reference to them, the assessment and prediction methods regarding road traffic noise, aircraft noise and railway noise in Japan are briefly introduced and remaining problems are discussed.

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The paper presents roughly the state of the art concerning the extraaural effects of noise.Noise-related alterations comprize primary effects that occur during the period of noise exposure(e.g.speech interference, sleep disorders, altered autonomous functions), secondary effects that are mediated by the primary effects(annoyance, degraded well-being and performance), and tertiary effects, i.e.long-term health effects(hypertension, cardiovascular diseases).Where the causal relations between noise and acute primary effects are evident and very likely for cumulative responses and secondary effects, it was as yet impossible to determine causal relations between health disorders and noise exposure despite well founded hypotheses.The difficulties to determine causal relations increase with the time lag between the on-set of noise exposure and the manifestation of an effect in question.The reasons are manifold.Where the primary effects were almost exclusively studied in the well controlled experimental situation in the laboratory, the assumed health effects cannot be studied but in the field, where the acoustical situation varies considerably and where many other acoustical and non-acoustical environmental agents may enhance, attenuate or even mask the primary and secondary responses to the noise in question but might nevertheless—as non-specific stimuli—contribute to the genesis and manifestation of health effects.Another important factor is habituation, that causes a reduction of primary and secondary responses with time.The significance of these contributors in view of the hypothesized health effects must be elucidated in future studies.Other topics for future research are discussed as well.

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The authors started the study of the impression of temporally varying sounds in 1960’s by developing the equipment to generated tempoally varying sounds.Since then many psychological experiments have been conducted and it was found that L_Aeq shows good correspondence with subjective impressions.In Japan in September 1998, Environmental Quality Standard for Noise was revised adopting L_Aeq as a noise measure.It is true that L_Aeq has many advantages and is a good measure of various noises.However, when it is adopted to determine a criteria of various kinds of noise and to predict subjective impressions of noises, there are some problems to be considered.They are, for example, (1)validity of A-weighting when sounds have prominent frequency components, (2)effect of qualitative aspects of sounds, and(3)effect of cognitive aspects of sound sources.These topics are discussed on the basis of the experimental data.

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In the 19th century Hermann von Helmholtz laid down the scientific basis for acoustical research in the most general terms.His assistant in Heidelberg, Wilhelm Wundt, founded the first psychological laboratory in the world in Leipzig and devoted himself to an intensive study of the measurement of loudness, drawing his inspirations to a great extent from the psychophysical ideas of his senior colleague, Gustav Theodor Fechner.Wundt’s personal library has been located in the University Library of Sendai for 75 years.A few details of this transaction are described.Heinrich Barkhausen also had many followers in Japan to whom he lent his support through his lectures on his journeys to Japan.In recent years Eberhard Zwicker and Seiichiro Namba have made an important contribution to German-Japanese cooperation.

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The influence of cognitive factors such as attention, short-term, and long-term memory on overall loudness of non-steady state sound has not yet been systematically investigated.In this paper, preliminary experimental results are presented, showing how loudness scalings of non-steady state traffic noise depend on memory.

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The state of the art of measurement systems to evaluate sound emissions in view of sound quality is reviewed.With respect to subjective evaluations of noise immissions, data for road, rail, and aircraft noise are compared.Physical measures for noise immissions based on features of the human hearing system are discussed in view of stability and economy of measurement time.The basic features of a method to predict noise immissions, also for future means of transportation(e.g.magnetic levitation train)are outlined.

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In case of vehicle noise, there exist two subjective feelings that have not been well quantified yet by utilizing existing psychoacoustical parameters.Those are booming sensation due to the presence of prominent low frequency interior noise and impulsiveness of the exterior noise at idel due to the knocking phenomenon from a diesel powerplant.For booming sensation, it is successfully quantified in our laboratory by utilizing the subjective response to booming sensation as the weighting function to the sensation level in case of stationary noise, i.e, interior noise at cruising mode.In order to extend this measure for applying this concept to non-stationary noise, i.e, acceleration noise, a new psychoacoustical measure named booming index was developed here.For the development of a measure representing impulsiveness of diesel exterior noise, exterior noise at idle is evaluated and the relation between the subjective result and the newly proposed measure named IMPULSE is discussed.This newly proposed measure is calculated with the average sound pressure that exceeds the root mean square value of the time waveform of the sound pressure.

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In 1973, Japan adopted WECPNL_J which is defined as a modified index of ICAO WECPNL, as an index of aircraft noise evaluation, and enacted“Environmental Quality Standard for Aircraft Noise.”So the Government has made all countermeasures to alleviate the aircraft noise impact around the airport.As a result, the noise exposure situation has been greatly improved for these twenty-five years.To evaluate noise exposure, an aircraft noise prediction model(JCAB Model)was developed by Civil Aviation Bureau of the Ministry of Transport of Japan(JCAB).The procedure for aircraft noise prediction has not been changed basically, but JCAB has been trying to improve the accuracy of noise prediction.First, this paper briefly reviews the Standard and a noise evaluation index WECPNL_J in the Standard.Then, it describes the basic idea of an airport-noise prediction model JCAB Model, which has been developed by JCAB, together with some recent result of examination about the accuracy of noise prediction.Finally, it refers to the relationship between WECPNL_J and L_den.

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In this paper the author gives a review about the measurement and analysis method of railway noise in Japan.First, the environmental goals for Japanese railways are introduced.Both Shinkansen and non-Shinkansen line standards have their own basis, and averages of L_max and L_eq are used respectively.Next, measurement of railway noise to evaluate the fulfillment of environmental standards is introduced.The status quo and future necessity of automatic data processing is described.Third, the author describes technical aspects of noise measurement and evaluation, that is, to locate noise sources and to estimate their contribution in the wayside.Since the observation time is very short, the variety of equipment is limited.It is thus an important technique to compare observed data to estimate the contribution of noise sources.Finally, the author briefly states about the basic ideas of formulating the equations of wayside noise assessement.

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According to the social survey of dose-response to environmental noise, the criteria are generally decided by noise level with the percentage of inhabitants who feel their outdoor noise to be highly annoyed.However, neutral reaction to environmental noise that occupies middle range between positive and negative reaction tends to be prevailing in usual social surveys and samples are collected efficiently.In this paper, we focus on neutral reaction of inhabitants in social surveys carried out in Nagoya City.We applied various kinds of statistical methods to the dose-response to environmental noise in order to derive the criteria.These results are compared with the ones on basis of strong or positive reaction.Moreover, we examine the stability of the criteria derived from different reactions and methods.

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The European Commission started activities to improve the environmental noise policy.In view of the high exposure of the population the future policy is no more restricted to the limitation of noise emissions but activities relating to the reduction of noise exposure are initiated based on the principle of shared responsibility.For the preparation of a new directive the Commission established several working groups, among others to work out proposals for harmonised European noise indicators(Working Group 1)and prediction and measurement methods(Working Group 3).In this paper the main recommendations of WG 1 are presented and discussed together with the basic concept of WG 3 for the elaboration of the harmonised prediction and measurement methods.Finally, the scope and the main regulations in the currently discussed draft of the new directive concerning the assessment and reduction of noise exposure are reported.

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The annual meeting of the German Acoustical Society, the so-called DEGA, started March 2000 with a special session on the state-of-the-art of immission prognosis.General aspects of basic physical properties affecting the approaches to model noise propagation outdoors were discussed in relation to engineering-like and empirical methods to achieve satisfactory prognosis results.10 papers were presented ranging from numerical calculation of wave propagation to in-situ measurements of the immission of airplane noise.Emphasis was laid in taking meteorological influence into account.

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