Vehicle Closure Sound Quality

This paper describes an investigation into the sound quality of passenger car and light truck closure sounds. The closure sound events that were studied included side doors, hoods, trunklids, sliding doors, tailgates, liftgates, and fuel filler doors. Binaural recordings were made of the closure sounds and presented to evaluators. Both paired comparison of preference and semantic differential techniques were used to subjectively quantify the sound quality of the acoustic events. Major psychoacoustic characteristics were identified, and objective measures were then derived that were correlated to the subjective evaluation results. Regression analysis was used to formulate models which can quantify customers perceptions of the sounds based on the objectively derived parameters. Many times it was found that the peak loudness level was a primary factor affecting the subjective impression of component quality. In several other cases, however, factors such as the length of the sound, the existence of multiple impacts, and sharpness proved to be more important for subjective preference. The resulting regression models can be used to quantify the sound quality of future closure hardware changes and guide engineers in the design of closure systems with optimal sound quality.