Subjective Evaluation of Vehicle Sound Quality

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Subjective Evaluation of Vehicle Sound Quality

Wang, Yansong / Guo, Hui / Yang, Chao

Subjective sound quality evaluation (SQE) is to obtain results that reflect humans’ auditory perception of sounds. To perform a subjective SQE of vehicle interior noise, some related procedures, such as determination of evaluation indices, the composition of evaluators, selection of evaluation methods and analysis of evaluated results (Otto et al. in SAE Trans 108:3015–3034, 2000; Gonzalez et al. in J Sound Vib 256:663–679, 2003), need to be considered. During the subjective SQE of vehicle noise, one must first determine the evaluation indices and carefully organize a jury to evaluate the measured sound samples using an appropriate subjective SQE method. And the evaluated results of the jury test should be analyzed statistically to examine their validity, effectiveness, etc. Generally, the subjective SQE for vehicle noise can be classified into two types, i.e., global and instantaneous evaluations. The global evaluation has a wide range of evaluation objects, including interior/exterior noises and whole vehicle (or components) noises: both stationary and non-stationary noises. Some subjective SQE methods, such as ranking, grade scoring, paired comparison, and semantic subdivision have been developed in the past few decades. The global evaluation focuses on people’s global and overall auditory perception of vehicle interior noise. Unlike the global evaluation, the instantaneous evaluation aims at the non-stationary sound. In the instantaneous subjective evaluation, the jury members evaluate the sound quality in real-time and give the results corresponding to the replayed sound samples. Through the global and instantaneous evaluations, the micro-local understandings of the sound quality of vehicle noise can be obtained regarding the global and instantaneous SQE parameters.