Abstract
WE have received from the Anti-Noise League at 66 Victoria Street, S.W.I, a reprint of an article on “Noise” by Dr. L. E. C. Hughes, which originally appeared in the columns of the Electrician. The League is doing admirable work in sponsoring a considerable number of publications on the various aspects of noise. These will be found both interesting and of service to the largely increasing public which is concerned with the problem of noise, whether from mechanical transport, modern housing or other contributory cause. That the country has become noise conscious is reflected in the noise abatement activities of the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Health, the National Physical Laboratory, the British Standards Institution and other bodies; and further restrictive legislation in various directions would appear to be not unlikely. The problem of the measurement of noise, or rather of its ‘equivalent loudness', is finding generally accepted solution both in Great Britain and abroad. The standard of comparison is a reference tone of 1,000 cycles per second with a specified arbitrary ‘zero’ of intensity. If the reference tone is increased in successive decibel steps of energy above the zero, the resulting changes of loudness are expressed in numerically identical steps on a scale of phons. The equivalent loudnesses of other sounds and noises are evaluated by aural matching against the reference tone when suitably adjusted. Other features to which Dr. Hughes refers in his informative article are the abatement of both air-borne sounds and impact noises and vibrations in buildings, impulse noises, and commercially available noise-measuring instruments.
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Noise. Nature 137, 25–26 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137025d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137025d0