“There exists no gold standard for the measurement of snoring.”
But a joint research team from the Human Sleep Research Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute in the US and Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany has recently made progress. They devised a set of experiments towards quantifying snoring annoyance, investigating the question – “Is the annoyance of snoring a reliable tool for the measurement of snoring or does it depend more on the sensitivity of the listener?”
To find out, 550 representative snoring sequences which had been recorded during polysomnography (PSG) sessions, were randomly presented to ten examiners for the evaluation of their annoyance – scored on a scale from 0 to 100 (where: 0 = 'no problem', 100 = 'excruciating'). Then the mean annoyance score for each snoring sound – and the covariance parameters for the snore evaluator and snoring sounds themselves (restricted maximum likelihood method) – were calculated.
Analysis of the results showed not only that the psychoacoustic evaluation approach may indeed be a valid one, but also that “…the listeners’ noise sensitivity is at least equally relevant for the snoring annoyance as the snoring sound itself.”
The Annoyance of Snoring is published in the European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Volume 266, Number 2 / February, 2009
