Powertrain Sound Quality Development of the Ford GT

The Ford GT is the modern re-creation of the 60's era supercar. The powertrain sound quality of the vehicle must enhance its powerful nature, meet regulatory requirements, and maintain a targeted level of refinement.

The Ford GT acoustic engineering team used time domain sound decomposition and sound synthesis techniques to determine the sub-system source sounds from surrogate vehicles. The donor source sounds (e.g. exhaust system) are recombined to produce the customer perceived vehicle listening experience from these sub-systems. Target sounds are developed by modifying sub-systems by level, frequency dominance, and order balance. Proposed target sounds are verified by a jury and the results are used for early target agreement and cascading to component targets. This exercise allows development of a customer focused powertrain target sound based on realistic hardware assumptions before any prototypes are available.