Development of the Sound Metric for the Impact Sound of a Car Using Wavelet Transform

Vehicles experience the impact due to harsh road conditions. Contact with a barrier on a road induces vehicles to vibrate, which brings about impact noise of high sound level. The attenuation of impact noise is an important issue since car passengers may complain about the impact noise. However, Perfect removal of impact noise is not possible as most of impact noise is caused by external conditions. It is thus necessary to make vehicles to possess more desirable sound quality characteristic of impact sound. More research is needed on objective attributes of impact noise; it is not a simple matter since impact noise is transient in nature and has a high level of sound at an instantaneous moment. A new objective attribute of impact noise is designed by using wavelet transform. Wavelet transform is appropriate for the analysis of transient signals such as impact noise. The usefulness of new objective attribute, which is a sound metric, is examined by comparison with the mean subjective rating for real impact noise of passenger cars. The new sound metric has better correlation with the mean subjective rating than already existing sound metrics.