Engine Sound Design Process with Utilization of Industrial Styling Design

Takashi Kondo; Seiji Hara; Kenji Torii; Koichi Yoshioka; Tatsunori Tsuruta; Motoyasu Sakaguchi; Masaya Miyazawa

doi:10.4271/2020-01-0402

This report will introduce a new engine sound design concept and propose a design process.

In sound design for automotive development of popular vehicles, it is common to seek to enhance the state of the existing marketed vehicle in order to meet further demands from customers. For standout models such as sports vehicles and flagship vehicles, sound design commonly reflects the sound ideals of the manufacturer’s branding or engineers. Each case has common point that the sound direction is determined by itself clearly. However, in this way, it is difficult to create abstract concept sound. Because it is no direction for the sound.

Therefore, this paper examines ways to achieve a new sound that satisfies a sound concept based on an unprecedented abstract concept “wood”. The reason why sound concept is “wood”, it is the difficult to make as a new engine sound and good study to reveal usefulness of new sound design process.

Therefore, the authors devised a new sound design process that would be necessary to design abstract concept sounds. The original sound design process was referred from industrial vehicle exterior and interior styling design process.

First, which is the most important step; we defined the concept “wood” by verbalizing adjectives for concrete. It is important to share the direction of the sound. To be specific, the Semantic Differential method with various sound subjective evaluation and factor analysis decided adjectives.

After the directionality of the sound design was decided by adjectives, in order to realize it, acoustic analysis and paired comparison method was performed with general impact sound.

Finally, the original engine sound was proved to achieve a target concept “wood” engine sound by sound subjective evaluation and prototype vehicle driving test. At the same time, original sound design process was clarified the usefulness.

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Engine Sound Design Process with Utilization of Industrial Styling Design 2020-01-0402

SAE MOBILUS