Development of 3D sound simulation system for flight simulator

Abstract

For the purpose of acquiring the immersion and reality of flight simulation, there is a necessity to reproduce 3D sound field of aircraft cockpit. In this paper, a 3D sound simulation system which is integrated into flight simulator used for training pilots is developed. After determining the sound events which will be simulated in flight simulation, spectrum analysis and time-frequency analysis are used to analyze original recordings for finding out the sound features of each part of an aircraft. And then sound sources which will be used in simulation can be extracted by using LMS adaptive filtering and other basic signal processing methods. Based on system integration and performance consideration, a new component of sound simulation system is presented and the object-oriented software development is used to develop the software part for matching this component. Two key technologies are particularly discussed in software realization: real-time sound synthesis and sound spatialization. The 3D sound simulation system meets development requirements after many flight tests and works reliably in a Boeing 737-800 flight simulator which is developed in our lab.