Automated Application of Active Sound Design

In modern vehicle acoustics, Active Sound Design (ASD) is a popular method to enhance the interior sound perception of a vehicle. In vehicles with a traditional internal combustion engine, the load dependency of the sound can be increased to give a positive dynamic feedback. Irritating small band resonances can be attenuated by boosting the surrounding frequency content, and downsized-engines with a small number of cylinders can be made to sound like the larger ones from former days. However, once a characteristic sound is designed for a specific vehicle, it is a tedious process to transfer this lead-sound to derivatives (e.g. same model but different exhaust system). So far, sound designers must adapt the ASD dataset manually - usually this takes several loops of measuring the vehicles interior sound on a track and adjusting the ASD settings back in the office. This paper introduces a new method of a semi-automated transfer of the interior sound from a reference vehicle to a target vehicle by using ASD, where the reference vehicle and every target vehicle must be measured only once. The novel software tool automatically compares the measurements of a reference-target-pair in terms of an order analysis. The resulting differences are directly used to create a new ASD dataset for the target vehicle. Presented test results show a remarkable match between the interior sounds of the chosen reference-target-pair.