Automotive sound quality - powertrain, road and wind noise

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Automotive sound quality - powertrain, road and wind noise

Cerrato, Gabriella

Vehicle sound and vibration quality is a very broad subject, since our interaction with the vehicle is fairly complex. Audio and tactile feedbacks are combined with visual cues and ever-changing driving and boundary conditions. In industrialized societies, where the use of passenger cars has been prevalent for the last several decades, we have developed precise expectations for the 'feel' of a car, and these expectations drive, along with cost and fuel consumption, our purchasing decisions. Noise and vibration play an important role in what is called the overall harmony of the vehicle. The term harmony is often used to describe the relationship between form on one extreme of the spectrum and function at the other extreme, and is associated to the oft-heard statement of 'form follows function'. In other words, today's vehicles have to perform all the functions that drivers and passengers expect while providing a comfortable and enjoyable environment. It is the job of human-factors experts to bridge the gap between form and function and establish a target balance between these two elements for each vehicle class and type. This article provides a brief summary of objective parameters or metrics used for each sub-system/component in a vehicle. The description of the techniques used to derive either these metrics (signal processing) or their correlation to customer perception (jury studies) is outside the scope of this article. However, an extensive list of references is provided, where these methods are detailed (references are grouped by system and chronologically within each system). Finally, the article is limited to the sound inherent in a vehicle during its operation, so it does not address issues such as sound quality of car audio or active noise control systems.