Comparison of Subjective and Physical Evaluation of Tennis-noise

In Europe, tennis courts are often built near houses. Therefore, in Europe, tennis together with soccer belongs to the most important sports for an investigation of recreation noise evaluation [1]. The residents near such sport grounds bemoan most of all the impulseand information-contents of these noises. Tennis-shots with the racket and the ball contacts with the ground cause the high impulse content of tennis court noises. Furthermore, many conversations, shouts and expressions of disappointment lead to a high information content. Further noise sources are the access road to the parking lots, the sliding of the players on the sand, the hitting of the ball on the wire fence etc. [2] In order to assess the noise burden it is useful to evaluate the immissions through physical measures adequate to our noise senses. In the practice of noise evaluation in Europe, today measuring procedures with the “Taktmaximalpegel” LAFTmax as measure are being used. For the “Taktmaximalpegel” each 5 seconds time interval is counted with the maximum-level LAFmax within these 5 seconds measuring time. The impulse contents of tennis noise led in the past to enormous problems for the evaluation of measuring results. In expert opinions that have been used by justice courts in disagreement cases as expert witness comments, the level fluctuation was interpreted as scaring cause and therefore insufficiently described merely by sound pressure levels. Certainly the “Taktmaximalpegel”procedure used in the Federal Republic of Germany leads because of the time sequences of the tennis-shots-impulses to an extremely high “impulse penalty” and so by comparing the measured values determined with this procedure and the immission target values to a quite strict evaluation. Some influences on the subjective noise sense such as for example the tennis shot-rate are not included in the evaluation by the “Taktmaximal”-procedure. At normal conditions, a tennis shot follows every two seconds. Therefore, a game at only one court – usually the court next to the immission place – already leads to a high sound pressure level in most time intervals. More sound impulses from another court do not lead to an increase of this sound pressure [2].