The annoyance of snoring

Is the annoyance of snoring a reliable tool for the measurement of snoring or does it depend more on the sensitivity of the listener? During an automatized hearing experiment, 550 representative snoring sequences, recorded during polysomnography, were randomly presented to ten examiners for the evaluation of their annoyance (0–100). The mean annoyance score for each snoring sound and the covariance parameters for rater and snoring sounds (restricted maximum likelihood method) were calculated. The average annoyance rating of all snoring sequences was 63.9 ± 23.0, the most acceptable snoring sequence rating was 49.2 ± 28.0, the most annoying rating was 77.7 ± 16.4. The covariance parameters were estimated as 28.7% for the rater and 22.3% for the snoring sound. Our results show that the listeners’ noise sensitivity is at least equally relevant for the snoring annoyance as the snoring sound itself.