Sound Quality Evaluation of Vehicle Interior Noise Based on Psychoacoustical Indices

Abstract

Based on a sample vehicle, a whole procedure for objective sound quality evaluation (SQE) of interior noise is conducted in this paper. Typical vehicle interior noises under different working conditions are measured at both the driver and rear passenger seats. The traditional A-weighted sound pressure level (SPL) and some psychoacoustical indices, such as loudness, sharpness and roughness of the measured noise signals are investigated. A new roughness model combined by the Aures’ and Daniel’s models for nonstationary vehicle noises are performed by Matlab programming and verified by the commercial software. In view of the calculated results, the loudnesses at the positions of the front and the rear passengers show in different changing patterns with the vehicle speed increasing; the sharpness heard by the rear passenger is always lower than that by the driver; and the roughness at the front passenger place (higher than the rear ones) can be mainly attributed to the speed changing components during vehicle accelerating. The conclusions drawn in this paper are very useful for acoustical design and improvement of the sample vehicle. And the presented SQE procedure may be possibly extended and used for SQE of other vehicles or products in engineering.