Perception et confort acoustiques des Systèmes de Traitement d'Air

This thesis addresses the perceived acoustic comfort of Air-Treatment Systems (ATS), such as air-conditioners installed in offices, by taking into account the environmental factors related to the specific context of ATS usage. The only existing standard to evaluate the sounds emitted by ATS, which is the emitted sound level in dBA, is only loosely related to perception. Therefore, the need of manufacturers for a more reliable standard arises. This implies a thorough study of the perception of the sound of ATS as it is emitted. A precise methodology was then followed: it includes first collecting a high number of ATS sound recordings, up to finally developing a robust metrics to predict the perceived sound quality. For that purpose, different perceptual categories were first identified to constitute the recording database of ATS sounds. A corpus considered as fully representative of the different types of emitted sounds was then extracted from the recording database. Current principles of musical timbre description have already proved to be adequate to other types of environmental sounds; by applying these principles, the relevant auditive attributes for the corpus perceptual description were identified. In order to develop an efficient sound quality predictor through audio features calculation, prominent features based on these auditive attributes were identified that explain the listeners' preferences among ATS sounds. The ecological context of ATS was examined in a second step. Two environmental factors were addressed in the context of ATS sound quality evaluation to ponder their importance in the listeners' perception. As the ATS under study are exclusively indoor systems designed for offices, the effect of reverberation on sound quality evaluation was first studied; for that purpose, an auralization tool was used to simulate room acoustic response. The influence of listeners' attention context on perceived sound quality was then evaluated through a comparative study of various listening conditions. As a matter of fact, the sound emitted by ATS in real conditions is perceived as a perturbation of current activities. It is therefore relevant to evaluate how deeply the degree of attention related to the sound affects listeners as regards their perception of acoustic quality. Eventually, the relevance of the proposed sound quality predictor to comfort perception was assessed in conditions more ecologically representative than usual laboratory environment.