Listening tests results of vehicle pass-by auralization

This study aims to evaluate the applicability of virtual reality techniques for urban sound environments assessment by auralization. The paper presents the evaluation of listening tests of controlled vehicle pass-by events in a basic urban scenario. Several vehicle pass-by noise events were recorded simultaneously by a dummy head and a microphone array, under different conditions of speed and gear. These events were simulated using the Virtual Acoustics (VA) plugin application and aurally compared to the respective binaural recorded audio. The paper describes the techniques employed to extract sound source characteristics from multi-channel signals and how to apply it to generate the sound source and receiver signals in the VA application. Detailed description of the listening tests is also provided, focusing to avoid biased results due to audio presentation order, signal type and other criteria. All the pass-by scenarios were simulated, and an aural evaluation was conducted to investigate which were the most relevant aspects for human perception of vehicular noise pass-by. Twenty subjects were questioned about the similarity between recorded and synthetic audio, considering car models, speed and acceleration. Several combinations of recorded and simulated A/B comparisons were considered, including the comparisons of two recorded audio. The study concluded that the participants could perceive the main characteristics under investigation. The fact of the audio being recorded or synthetic did not present a large influence over the results. Accordingly, the paper has shown that the proposed method can be applicable for recreating urban scenarios with moving vehicles. © 2025 Institute of Noise Control Engineering.