Abstract:

Throughout his career in acoustics Robert Young has maintained a major interest in the development of good measurement practices for a variety of acoustical measurements. One of his major interests has been in the measurement of outdoor sounds as experienced by community residents. He has been one of the long-term, principal advocates of the use of an A-weighted sound level as a primary measure for noise as it relates to the response of people. He has shown that the A-weighted sound level can be used to describe the acoustical environments produced by sound sources as diverse as those of the quasisteady noise at an industrial site, the intermittent noise such as that produced by sequences of aircraft operations around an airport, to the impulsive sound produced by a sonic boom from the landing of a space shuttle orbiter.