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Door closing sounds are an important element of the craftsmanship image of a vehicle. This paper examines the relationship between closure sound quality and door system design. The perception of door closing sound quality is shown to be primarily related to it's loudness and sharpness. Of the two, sharpness is more important than loudness. Other factors, like ring-down may also affect closure sound quality. The door system is made up of a number of components. The most important in terms of sound quality are the door and body structure, latch, and door seals. Each of these are classified as either a sound source, a transmission path or a sound radiator. Methods for improving the design of these components for good closure sound quality are discussed in some detail.

Roughness is an attribute often used by customers to describe one of the annoying properties of automotive powertrain sounds. However, subjective ratings of roughness do not always correlate well with the psychoacoustic unit of roughness, aspers. The discrepancy between many existing objective measures of roughness and experimentally measured perceived roughness of powertrain noise is what motivates the work described in this paper. Several subjective experiments are conducted with real powertrain sounds as stimuli to study this discrepancy. Objective measures of roughness based on an AM model as well as an auditory model of roughness are applied. The results indicate that loudness can be a confounding factor. Also, contrary to what the objective measures predicted, subjects showed poor performance in these roughness discrimination tasks. The effect of binaural cues is also investigated and test results indicate that it is not a major factor in the scaling of roughness.