A framework for the acoustic simulation of passing vehicles using variable length delay lines

Abstract

The sound produced by vehicles driving on roadways constitutes one of the dominant noise sources in urban areas. The impact of traffic noise on human activities and the related investigation on modeling, assessment, and abatement strategies fueled the research on the simulation of the sound produced by individual passing vehicles. Simulators enable in fact to promote a perceptual assessment of the nature of traffic noise and of the impact of single road agents on the overall soundscape. In this work, we present TrafficSoundSim, an open-source framework for the acoustic simulation of vehicles transiting on a road. We first discuss the generation of the sound signal produced by a vehicle, represented as a combination of road/tire interaction noise and engine noise. We then introduce a propagation model based on the use of variable length delay lines, allowing to simulate acoustic propagation and Doppler effect. The proposed simulator incorporates the effect of air absorption and ground reflection, modeled via complex-valued reflection coefficients dependent on the road surface impedance, as well as a model of the directivity of sound sources representing the passing vehicles. The source signal generation and the propagation stages are decoupled, and all effects are implemented using finite impulse response filters. Moreover, no recorded data is required to run the simulation, making the framework flexible and independent on data availability. Finally, to validate the framework capability to accurately simulate passing vehicles, a comparison between synthetic and recorded pass-by events is presented. The validation shows that sounds generated with the proposed method achieve a good match with recorded events in terms of power spectral density and psychoacoustics metrics as well as a perceptually plausible result.