Perception of Vehicle Interior Sounds with Electrified Drives

The interior sound of vehicles is a major criterion when buying a new or used vehicle. For both pure-electric and hybrid vehicles, separately audible tonal components severely influence the pleasantness of the interior sound. Previous studies revealed that for sounds of vehicles with electrified drives, besides the tire-road and wind noise components, mainly higher-frequency tonal components influence the pleasantness. Within the present work, the audibility of those components has been determined by a modified version of an auditory masking model. For those vehicles, disturbing sound components are usually prominent during transient driving conditions.

Therefore, the temporal changes of psychoacoustic parameters should be considered for the pleasantness prediction. A long short-term memory neural network depicts the relationship between time series of psychoacoustic parameters and a single value of pleasantness, which has been acquired by conducting auditory experiments with both original and augmented electric and hybrid vehicle interior sounds. The general scope of the dissertation is to develop a model of pleasantness for interior sounds of vehicles with electrified drives using a long shortterm memory model approach. The predictions form the basis for constructive countermeasures or active sound design concepts to improve the pleasantness of the interior sound.