Psychoacoustic parameters and annoyance of road traffic noise in the urban area of Massarosa, Italy

The LIFE NEREiDE project, started in August 2016, is focused on the evaluation of the performance of new porous asphalt pavements composed by recycled asphalt pavements and crumb rubber from End-of-Life tires. This paper describes the applied methodology and the results obtained in a noise monitoring campaign and social survey performed in the NEREiDE project. The field activities have been carried out in the Municipality of Massarosa (Italy) before laying the new road pavement in order to determine its psychoacoustic fingerprint in the "ante operam" configuration. Binaural recordings of traffic noise were performed alongside the road and a questionnaire was submitted to the inhabitants living nearby the selected six measurement sites. The acoustic parameters obtained from the binaural recordings can be considered a rough fingerprint of tire/road noise and the approach of the community tolerance level (CTL) seems more suitable to fit the experimental data on noise annoyance.