Road Noise Auralisation for Planning New Roads

This paper introduces a method to create auralisations involving road noise. The method has evolved over some years now and is based on binaural recordings of real vehicles. The overall purpose is to make exact and reliable sound presentations for people living next to planned, expanded or remodelled highways. Among others, The Danish Road Directorate has experienced that explaining future noise with graphs, noise maps and words leaves a large group of the population frustrated - Because they simply have no prerequisites to understand these terms. Even in cases, when noise is reduced, this is not really trusted by some neighbours.We believe now that auralisation based on accurate terrain modelling and by-pass recordings of real vehicles is the feasible way to involve more people in the debate of future road projects. It certainly gives most of the population a sense of the noise induced annoyance, they are facing. Thus, auralisation is an important and supporting remedy to ordinary noise maps etc.Additionally, auralisations have shown very powerful in explaining general acoustic terms and sound propagation like the influence of wind direction and speed, the effect of noise reducing surfaces and noise barriers.