Abstract

Noise exposure causes many types of adverse effects on health: auditory and non auditory; conscious and unconscious; physiological and psycho-social. The extent of each effect depends on the frequency content of the acoustic stimulus. This work analyzes the sound frequencies capable to induce each one of the effects of noise on humans. The main goal was to evaluate the efficiency of the A-weighting network from the point of view of health. In this direction, an extensive bibliographic review about the effects of noise on people and the frequencies that eventually cause the effects were carried out. The noise spectra related with each effect on health were grouped and analyzed with different criteria and subsequently compared with the A-weighting network. The results shown that some serious effects of noise on health, that take place at high sound levels, are due to the low frequency range. Consequently, it was concluded that the A-weighting network appears not being adequate for evaluating the global effect of noise on humans, in particular when the noise has very high inmision sound pressure levels. It is suggested to record the noise spectrum during the measurements. It will allow a better understanding of the cause-effect relationship and the possibility to apply other frequency weighting networks in future.