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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.

Crank rumble is an amplitude-modulation of engine noise perceived inside a car. It is common under full load acceleration but not under part load acceleration, so could cause concern. Honda and Ricardo carried out a program of work to research methods to reduce the perceived (subjective) level of crank rumble inside a vehicle under part load acceleration. Transfer Path Analysis (TPA) is a method of predicting vehicle interior noise by separating sources (the engine) and transfer paths (the vehicle body). TPA was applied in the time domain to allow subjective assessment of the different contributors to the interior sound quality. Subjective assessment was performed by a panel of listeners, to avoid bias caused by individual opinions. This approach identified key contributors to the perceived crank rumble, and allowed targets to be set. Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) was used to study a range of modifications to the engine.