Michael Smith

• Bachelor of Engineering
• Principal Acoustics Engineer | Director at Altissimo Consulting

Long-term exposure to transportation noise can have detrimental effects on human health, amenity, and productivity. These effects have economic and social costs which are borne by the individual, the health system and the broader economy. The primary purpose of this working paper is to estimate the total costs of this noise exposure for different t...

Reviews international approaches to monetising the health impacts of transport noise, and why this could be useful

Discusses technical issues with capturing noise data for road-traffic noise, and analysis techniques for identifying and classifying individual events

An assessment of tonal audibility to ISO 1996-2 is a common requirement in consent conditions for wind farm developments. The technique requires the determination of the sound pressure level of local peaks in the frequency spectrum, along with the average masking noise level in the critical listening band surrounding each peak. An automated tonalit...

The NZ Transport Agency has developed a number of online calculators for road-traffic noise and construction noise and vibration. These tools allow members of the public, project managers, and contractors to perform calculations that would typically be the domain of an acoustics specialist. The calculators use recognised methods (CRTN, BS 5228) app...

NZS 6808 and other similar wind farm assessment standards require sound level measurements at neighbouring houses with and without the wind farm operating. While outlining a procedure for assessment using regression curves, the standards allow significant discretion in how the data are analysed. Issues with this analysis are reviewed and suggestion...

Calculating the attenuation provided by barriers and other screening elements is an essential part of practical noise control engineering. There are well-documented approaches to this problem, with noise propagation standards often specifying which approach to take. A noticeable exception is CONCAWE: the principal prediction method used in Australi...