Perceptual analyses of automobile door closure sounds

Among environmental sounds, we have chosen to study a class of action-related impact sounds: automobile door closure sounds. We propose to describe these sounds using a model composed of perceptual properties. The development of the perceptual model was derived from the evaluation of many door closure sounds measured under controlled laboratory listening conditions. However, listening to such sounds normally occurs within a natural context, which probably modifies their perception. We therefore need to study differences between the real situation and the laboratory situation by following standard practices in order to specify the precise listening conditions and observe the influence of previous learning, expectations, action-perception interactions, and attention given to sounds. Our process consists in doing in situ experiments that are compared with specific laboratory experiments in order to isolate certain influential, context dependent components.

In the current presentation we focus on the perceptual influence of the vehicle’s image on the quality judgments based on door closure sounds and on some associated methodological aspects. We present two experiments in which subjects evaluate the quality of the vehicle from door closure sounds under various conditions: sounds with videos vs sounds alone at laboratory, then sounds In situ (specific listening, without handling) vs sounds alone at laboratory. The image of the vehicle modifies the quality evaluation (better evaluation for good vehicles and vice versa), this effect being weak for the video condition, but very strong for the In situ condition.

The results take part in the modeling of the differences between real and laboratory situations for sound perception. We also suggest that the real sight of the vehicle is more impacting that its video representation, even if subjects have the same knowledge about vehicle. The subjects are able to better dissociate the sounds from the contextual components in the laboratory situation with the videos of the vehicles than in the real situation, for which the immersion in context is global and the vehicles are presented on the real scale.