Measurement, Simulation and Auralization of Indoor Road Traffic Noise

Paper in proceeding, 2022

Building new houses in urban areas is often hindered by the presence of road traffic noise. Thereby, it is especially difficult to achieve sufficient façade sound insulation at low frequencies. Current regulations are mostly based on A-weighted levels and hence not only disregard low frequencies but also omit other factors that might influence the amount of disturbance such as time structure, traffic distance, proportion of heavy vehicles, driving speed and background noise. This motivates the need for experiments evaluating the human response to indoor traffic noise in a controlled virtual environment. Thereby, one challenge is to include the incidence angle dependent transfer paths through the façade in the auralization. The method presented in this paper utilises wave field synthesis in order to reproduce the sound field caused by moving sound sources on the outside of a window in a, specifically for this purpose designed, living room lab. In order to evaluate the auralization, a physical model of the source position dependent transfer path from a moving outdoor sound source through a window to an indoor receiver position was developed.