Reaction time while driving is crucial, and even one second can be the difference between life and death. As safety vehicles use sirens to alert civilians, the ability of the public to respond appropriately to such signals will depend on the audibility of sirens. This project aims to evaluate the impacts of sound damping from the inside of vehicles on the audibility of safety sirens in the presence of varying levels of auditory stimuli or in the absence of such stimuli. These questions are crucial to public safety as more than 90% of people listen to some sort of auditory stimuli, such as music, while driving. When drivers can’t hear emergency sirens, they can’t properly react to them; thus endangering both themselves and the emergency personnel. When music is added on top of the already dampened sound, the siren becomes inaudible until the safety vehicle is right on the driver. This project quantifies the minimum music/auditory stimuli needed to make the siren undetectable, and measures how the siren attenuates. Findings are discussed in terms of sirens effectiveness in alerting drivers in the presence of ambient noise and its correlated reaction time. Ultimately, this research not only aims to benefit the field of audiology, but the safety of the public and emergency personnel as well.
Presenter(s): Madeline Webber, Speech Pathology & Audiology and Premedical Studies Major
Advisor(s): Christopher Beer, Department of Physics
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