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Fluctuation in the sound pressure level of the interior noise of an on-road vehicle is always caused by unpredictable factors such as wind gusts, traffic, roadside obstacles, and changing drive-by-drive conditions, and is hence, not reproducible in nature. Since the human brain is known to be more sensitive to noise that is amplitude-modulated than noise at a steady level [1], it is important to evaluate and improve the NVH performance of a vehicle in terms of the fluctuating interior noise likely to be experienced by drivers or users. To this end, an evaluation system was developed as part of this study, the details of which are presented in this paper. The system is composed of hardware for database storage and replay of sounds, and software for synthesizing the noise signals. For given wind tunnel test results, the evaluation system yields a wind noise model that can synthesize wind noise signals for any wind scenario.

Passengers sitting on the back seats of cars while talking on their mobiles can easily experience the invasion of their speech privacy by the driver. Protecting speech privacy can be done by utilizing masking sounds - masking sound may be so loud that it annoys both drivers and speakers. In this research, the feasibility of utilizing active noise control (ANC) which aims to reduce the level of speech at the driver’s seat and, hence, is able to lower the needed level of masking sounds while still protecting the speech privacy is investigated. Speech reception threshold (SRT), which is a subjective measurement method for speech intelligibility, is proceeded for seeing the effect of ANC on speech intelligibility when the masking sound is in use. The SRT measurement result implied that utilizing ANC to reduce the speech level of the back-seat passenger at the driver’s seat is able to lower the needed level of masking sound for keeping the speech privacy.