Evaluating the impact of construction noise across multiple years

Noise permeates all our lives, but understanding the extent of the annoyance caused by a sound source can be challenging, particularly when the noise is the result of a long-term project like road construction.

Pinsonnault-Skvarenina et al. performed a four-year longitudinal study examining the effects of construction noise on the surrounding community. During this period, they regularly surveyed over 1,400 individuals living near the site of a major highway interchange undergoing rehabilitation.

“By following the same population over a four-year period, this study was able to observe changes in annoyance reduction that would be missed in a single-time-point survey,” said author Alexis Pinsonnault-Skvarenina.

The authors grouped participants based on their distance from the construction site, and asked questions about their homes, sleep patterns, and work activities, before gathering their opinions on how construction work affected their daily lives.

They found that while the construction noise remained relatively steady throughout the four-year period, the annoyance levels of participants declined, suggesting that non-acoustic factors, like dust and vibrations, play a more significant role in shaping community perceptions.

The team also identified “noise events,” instances where the construction noise stood out from the ambient sound environment, as key indicators of noise-related annoyance.

“We now wish to build on this by investigating whether this type of emergence noise indicator can also be used to predict or relate to annoyance from other types of environmental noise, particularly traffic noise,” said Pinsonnault-Skvarenina. “This would allow us to assess the broader applicability of the indicator and to explore whether the mechanisms that drive noise annoyance in construction contexts are similar to those involved in traffic noise exposure.”

Source: “Construction noise annoyance and its evolution: Insights from the turcot project longitudinal study,” by Alexis Pinsonnault-Skvarenina, Mathieu Carrier, Annelies Bockstael, Jean-Pierre Gagné, and Tony Leroux, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0036643 .