Title
Application of kurtosis to underwater sound
Author
Müller, R.A.J.
von Benda-Beckmann, A.M.
Halvorsen, M.B.
Ainslie, M.A.
Publication year
2020
Abstract
Regulations for underwater anthropogenic noise are typically formulated in terms of peak sound pressure, root-mean-square sound pressure, and (weighted or unweighted) sound exposure. Sound effect studies on humans and other terrestrial mammals suggest that in addition to these metrics, the impulsiveness of sound (often quantified by its kurtosis β) is also related to the risk of hearing impairment. Kurtosis is often used to distinguish between ambient noise and transients, such as echolocation clicks and dolphin whistles. A lack of standardization of the integration interval leads to ambiguous kurtosis values, especially for transient signals. In the current research, kurtosis is applied to transient signals typical for high-power underwater noise. For integration time (t 2 - t 1), the quantity (t 2 - t 1) / β is shown to be a robust measure of signal duration, closely related to the effective signal duration, τ eff for sounds from airguns, pile driving, and explosions. This research provides practical formulas for kurtosis of impulsive sounds and compares kurtosis between measurements of transient sounds from different sources. © 2020 Acoustical Society of America.
Subject
Acoustic noise
Audition
Higher order statistics
Mammals
Pile driving
Piles
Signaling
Anthropogenic noise
Echolocation clicks
Hearing impairments
Integration time
Root Mean Square
Transient signal
Underwater noise
Underwater sound
Underwater acoustics
Air gun
Explosion
Human
Noise
Standardization
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0001631
TNO identifier
880192
Publisher
Acoustical Society of America
ISSN
0001-4966
Source
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 148 (2), 780-792
Document type
article