Perceived sound character and objective properties of car interior noise

Along with the development of noise control technology, the research on noise quality has being paid more and more attentions, especially in the fields of automobile and household appliance. The characterisation of human perception for noise is important to develop a guideline for the acoustic design of those products. This study aims to characterise the listeners' 'preference' for a set of vehicle interior noises, and to build up a relationship between objective acoustical parameters and subjective perceptual 'preference' of noises. The loudness-adjusted vehicle interior noises were taken as sound stimuli. Based on subjective experiment and statistical analysis, the contribution of physics-acoustics, psychoacoustics and their statistics to the evaluation of noise quality were investigated. It was found that along with sharpness and average special loudness, speech intelligibility index play a large part in the 'preference' of vehicle interior noise quality. 'Preference' mode was established on the basis of the pair-wise comparison of 15 samples and verified by data from semantic differential method of 40 samples. The results showed that the 'preference' mode has a better fit.