Auralization of aircraft noise in an urban environment

Aircraft noise is a major issue in urban areas and is one of the research topicswithin the FP7 SONORUS project. Current methods for determining the impact ofaircraft noise on annoyance and sleep disturbance are based on energeticquantities disregarding the dynamic character of the sound. To obtain a morecomplete representation of annoyance, one should predict the audible aircraftsound and determine the impact of the aircraft sound on people.A tool was developed to auralize aircraft noise. The propagation model includes,aside from the typically considered propagation effects like Doppler shift andground reflection, also amplitude and phase modulations due to atmosphericturbulence. Depending on parameters that are used to describe the atmosphericturbulence, the amplitude modulations result in clearly audible modulations andvertical peaks in a spectrogram. The phase modulations cause additionaldecorrelation.An inverse propagation model and an automated procedure to extract features todescribe aircraft emission was developed. Validation of the features was donethrough listening tests where listeners were asked to rate both recordings andauralizations based on the extracted features and with the use of thepropagation model.