Identification of quality attributes of automotive idle sounds and whole-body vibrations

Abstract

The aims of this study are the generation and comparison of the semantic spaces of vehicle idling sounds and vibrations and the determination of their quality dimensions. In this study, two different sets of quality attributes were developed for idling sounds (34 attributes) and whole-body vibrations (22 attributes). In contrast to prior investigations, the results demonstrated that the sound level alone is an insufficient attribute for describing the complexity of idle sounds and vibration perceptions. The qualities of both idle sounds and idle vibrations have multidimensional, complex characters. The results show that intensity-dependent attributes, signal-based attributes in terms of spectrum and temporal properties, and comfort- and emotion-based attributes are all required to characterise the idling noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) performance of vehicles. Therefore, an index was proposed based on psychoacoustic metrics such as loudness, sharpness, roughness, fluctuation strength, and relative approach. The results also show that emotional aspects play an important role for the assessment of sound and vibrations.