Modeling the perceptions of Rumbling, humming and booming in the context of vehicle interior sounds

Abstract

Sensations associated with an auditory perception of low-frequency tonal components are humming, rumbling and booming. While humming is commonly associated with an audible low-frequency tone, rumbling requires a temporal level fluctuation of such a tonal component and booming is associated with sounds that, in addition to the low-frequency tone, contain higher tonal components, which are related to the low-frequency tone. This study presents a model that predicts the magnitude of these sensations for interior sounds of vehicles with combustion engines running at low rotation rates, where low-frequency components are often audible. For the model development, own experimental data of recorded interior sounds and altered versions of these sounds were used. The model combines an auditory processing model with a Gaussian Process Regression approach. Key features of the auditory processing model are that it simulates the frequency-place transformation at the auditory periphery with a bank of auditory band pass filters and the frequency selectivity to temporal amplitude modulations with a bank of modulation band pass filters. It is shown that auditory filters up to a center frequency of 1000 Hz and modulation filters of up to 28 Hz are required for a good prediction of the data.