The quality of exhaust sound has become one of the important factors in the motorcycle market.
Therefore both an efficient sound quality evaluation method and technology to achieve ideal sound quality have become necessary.
Sound qualify evaluation has generally been performed by trial and error through repeated modification of exhaust silencer construction until desired quality was obtained.
But it usually took painstaking work and long hours.
In order to solve such problems, we established an objective auditory evaluation method.
We also applied Principal component analysis to analize the result of the “Semantic Differential Method (SD method)” so as to determine the affecting elements.
Through this analysis system, “powerful sound” caused by relatively higher content of the low frequency range and “crispy sound” caused by a cyclic sound pattern were determined to be desirable sounds for “American type” motorcycles.
We established a system for approximate frequency distribution characteristic estimation for simply constructed exhaust silencers by introducing a numerical computation method, called “Finite Element Method (FEM)” and “Boundary Element Method(BEM)” to estimate the sound when exhaust silencer component elements are modified.