Roadway Traffic Sound Measured up on a High-Rise Building–The Sound-Level’s Statistical Normality

Abstract

Percentile-value ceilings/thresholds have been mandated by governments around the world on roadway traffic sound-level. Such percentile values, by definition, change with the sound-level's underlying probability distribution, i.e., the same percentile can imply different percentile values for different probability distributions. Whether the underlying probability distribution is Gaussian or not for the roadway traffic sound-level: contrary reports populate the open literature but such reports are typically weak in statistical rigor. This decades-long but ongoing debate will be surveyed comprehensively in this paper for the first time in the open literature. Then, this paper will present two new datasets measured in two separate evenings at exactly the same location up in a high-rise building, and will employ the Jarque-Bera hypothesis test to rigorously show that neither dataset is Gaussian.