François de Curel (1854-1928) went down into the history of the French theater as an author of ‘thesis plays’. However, his works contain the features of the so-called ‘drama crisis’ which manifests itself at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, by the rejection of the canonical rules advocated since Aristotle. In fact, by analyzing A False Saint (1892), we are forced to note that the writer is undermining the dramatic structure by shifting his gaze from action to the study of the souls of the characters. Deprived of all will, they slowly get bogged down in their shady as inert world. In this way, the French playwright puts emphasis not on ‘acting character’ but on ‘retrospective character’ (passive) who dwells on his unhappy life.

Management of metropolitan areas – foreign experience and their Polish implications. The aim of the article is to present problems of development of metrotopolitan areas as premises for creating various forms of territorial integrated management. The reference point is the Report “The OECD Metropolitan Governance Survey” (2014). The models of metropolitan integration were analyzed in both: “the top-down” legal and political solutions of European countries as well as “bottom-up initiatives” of building local government partnerships. The metropolitan reforms in Germany, France and Italy were discussed as good solutions. Against this background, the dilemmas of managing metropolitan areas in Poland, implementation of EU instrument – ITI and possible direction of metropolitan reform are presented.

This article presents results of investigations of the angle of directional hearing acuity (ADHA) as a measure of the spatial hearing ability with a special emphasis on people with hearing impairments. A modified method proposed by Zakrzewski has been used - ADHA values have been determined for 8 azimuths in the horizontal plane at the height of the listeners' head. The two-alternative-forced-choice method (2AFC), based on a new system of listeners' responses (left - right instead of no difference - difference in location of sound sources) was the procedure used in the experiment. Investigations were carried out for two groups of subjects: normal hearing people (9 persons) and hearing impaired people (sensorineural hearing loss and tinnitus - 9 persons). In the experiment different acoustic signals were used: sinusoidal signals (pure tones), 1/3 octave noise, amplitude modulated 1/3 octave noise, CCITT speech and traffic noises and signals corresponding to personal character of tinnitus for individual subjects. The results obtained in the investigations showed, in general, a better localization of the sound source for noise type signals than those for tonal signals. Inessential differences exist in ADHA values for particular signals between the two groups of subjects. On the other hand, significant differences for tinnitus signals and traffic noise signals were stated. A new system of listeners' responses was used and appeared efficient (less dispersion of results compared to the standard system).

The aim of the study was to investigate how the time structure of a road-traffic affects the noise annoyance judgment. In a psychoacoustic experiment, the listeners judged noise annoyance of four road-traffic noise scenarios with identical numbers of vehicles and LAeq, T value but different time structure of a road traffic. The traffic structure varied from even to highly clustered across different scenarios. The scenarios were created in the laboratory from a large set of a single vehicle pass-by recordings. The scenarios were additionally filtered with filters corresponding to a typical window transfer function to simulate the situation inside the building. The experimental results showed that there is a significant difference in annoyance judgment for different traffic structures with the same LAeq, T value. The highest annoyance ratings were obtained for even traffic distribution and the most clustered distribution resulted in the lowest annoyance rating. These results correlated well with the averaged loudness, whereas the percentile loudness (N5) and level (L5) predict the opposite results.

Annoyance ratings for artificially created noises, resembling the main characteristics of temporal wind turbine noise, were studied by means of a listening experiment involving 21 participants with normal hearing. Three types of stimuli were examined: broadband noise (−4 dB/octave), noise generated by moving cars, and narrowband noise. All stimuli had the sound level fluctuations typical for wind turbine noise. The magnitude of the sound level fluctuations was measured in a quantitative way, by using the characteristics of amplitude modulated sound: modulation rate and modulation depth. Our aim was to examine how the modulation rate and the modulation depth influence the noise annoyance assessment of broadband and narrowband amplitude modulated noises. Three different modulation rates, 1, 2 and 4 Hz, and sound level fluctuations (a measure of the modulation depth), 3, 6, 9 dB, were applied to each type of stimuli (with exception of noise generated by the moving cars) and investigated. The participants in the listening experiment were presented with sound stimuli in laboratory conditions and asked to rate their annoyance on a numerical scale. The results have shown a significant difference between the investigated conditions. The effect was particularly strong between the annoyance judgments of different types of noise (narrow and broadband), and modulated versus unmodulated noises. Temporal fluctuations occurring in wind turbine noise are very pertinent to the perception of annoyance and could be responsible for its being a relatively annoying noise source. The obtained results were discussed and compared to the typical modulation rates and level changes that occur in recordings of real wind turbine noise.