The most widespread and well-documented subjective response to noise is annoyance, which may include fear and mild anger, related to a belief that one is being avoidably harmed. Noise is also seen as intrusive into personal privacy, while its meaning for any individual is important in determining whether that person will be annoyed by it.
Annoyance reactions are often associated with the degree of interference that any noise causes in everyday activities, which probably precedes and leads on to annoyance. In both traffic and aircraft noise studies, noise levels have been found to be associated with annoyance in a dose–response relationship. Overall, it seems that conversation, watching television or listening to the radio (all involving speech communication) are the activities most disturbed by aircraft noise while traffic noise, if present at night, is most disturbing for sleep.