Citation

Bezat MC, Kronland-Martinet R, Roussarie V, Ystad S. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2014; 136(1): 226.

Affiliation

LMA, CNRS, UPR 7051, Aix-Marseille Univ, Centrale Marseille, F-13402 Marseille Cedex 20, France.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, American Institute of Physics)

DOI

10.1121/1.4883364

PMID

24993209

Abstract

This article describes the first part of a study aiming at adapting the mechanical car door construction to the drivers' expectancies in terms of perceived quality of cars deduced from car door sounds. A perceptual cartography of car door sounds is obtained from various listening tests aiming at revealing both ecological and analytical properties linked to evoked car quality. In the first test naive listeners performed absolute evaluations of five ecological properties (i.e., solidity, quality, weight, closure energy, and success of closure). Then experts in the area of automobile doors categorized the sounds according to organic constituents (lock, joints, door panel), in particular whether or not the lock mechanism could be perceived. Further, a sensory panel of naive listeners identified sensory descriptors such as classical descriptors or onomatopoeia that characterize the sounds, hereby providing an analytic description of the sounds. Finally, acoustic descriptors were calculated after decomposition of the signal into a lock and a closure component by the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method. A statistical relationship between the acoustic descriptors and the perceptual evaluations of the car door sounds could then be obtained through linear regression analysis.

Language: en