Power Seat Adjuster Noise Metric Development & Correlation to Subjective Response Data

This paper describes the development of a model for the predicted quality assessment of power seat mechanisms. This model was based on the statistical correlation of objective popular sound quality metrics (and their associated distribution statistics) to a set of subjective results obtained in a previously reported [1] semantic differentials evaluation experiment. More important then the model itself, the greatest surprises were in the statistical analyses of the subjective response data and the statistical significance and independence of the various commercial software generated sound quality metrics. Step-wise regression was used to identify a sub-set of independent variables that best fit the subjective response data and determine the appropriate model coefficients. This resultant model showed significantly better correlation to this population of subjective response data than other overall sound quality metrics e.g., Loudness, UBA, Pleasantness, etc.