Characterization of an axle-gear whine sound in a sports utility vehicle and its objective evaluation based on synthetic sound technology and an artificial neural network

Abstract

The gear whine sound of an axle system is one of the most important sound qualities in a sports utility vehicle (SUV). Previous work has shown that, because of masking effects, it is difficult to evaluate the gear whine sound objectively by using only the A-weighted sound pressure level. In this paper, the characteristics of the axle-gear whine sound were first investigated on the basis of synthetic sound technology, and a new objective evaluation method for this sound was developed by using sound metrics, which are the psychoacoustic parameters, and the artificial neural network (ANN) used for the modelling of the correlation between objective and subjective evaluation. This model developed by using ANN was applied to the objective evaluation of the axle-gear whine sound for real SUVs and the output of the model was compared with subjective evaluation. The results indicate a good correlation of over 90 per cent between the subjective and objective evaluations.