Applying spatial continuity and the Doppler effect along with auralisation in urban environment

Abstract

Noise pollution as a result of traffic has a negative health impact. A-weighted sound pressure levels offer a way to quantify noise, however they do not fully capture how people perceive the acoustic surroundings. Auralisation makes it possible to hear for example the impact of a proposed road or sound attenuating measure such as a noise barrier. Performing auralisations can become computationally costly especially for larger models which are typical for urban acoustics. Using interpolations methods has the potential not only to improve the performance at discontinuities close to barriers and walls but also cut costs related to noise investigations. Furthermore investigation around the Doppler effect and especially the Doppler factors impact on auralisation has been scarce. Therefore these two aspects were also considered when auralising the different pass by situations. Six different interpolation methods were tested with 12 different discretisation steps, evaluated qualitatively as well quantitatively by energy levels and psycho acoustic metrics. The qualitative listening tests indicate along with the quantitative tests that step size is more important than choice of interpolation method. The Doppler effect and Doppler factor had an impact on the auralisations however not larger than the Just noticeable difference for the psycho acoustic metrics.