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Re: Audibility of fire alarms



Dear Brad,
I recently had to deal with the problem of warning signals and
particularly seek to map acoustic parameters and warning messages. This
not quite exactly the topic you are adressing but I give in the atteched
file (sorry, part of it is in french) some references related to warning
signals design.
Roughly speaking, there are 4 main approaches:
* Acoustical approach (ref. [18]): The acoustical signal has to reach a
given acoustical level everywhere it has to be heard
* Psycho-acoustical approach (ref. [2] [5] [9]): The audiblity threshold
of the warning signals have to very low, for the typical background
noise in which they are used.
* Urgency approach (ref. [7] [15] [16] [27]): The urgency feeling
conveyed by the signals have to match the urgency of the situation
* Cognitive and semiotic approach (ref. [1] [3] [6] [12] [13]): The
signal does not only convey an alarm but a warning message, which has to
tell the listener what's happening precisely.
I hope this can be useful for you,
Regards Guillaume

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Guillaume Lemaitre, Ph.D.
Post-doctoral fellow
Project-team REVES (REndering and Virtual Environments with Sounds)
INRIA Sophia-Antipolis                 tel: (+33) (0)4 92 38 50 83
2004 route des Lucioles               fax: (+33) (0)4 92 38 50 30
BP 93, F-06902 Sophia-Antipolis
Guillaume.Lemaitre@sophia.inria.fr,
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Attachment: Ref.ps
Description: PostScript document