Comprehensive Automotive Active Sound Design

In the past years Active Sound Design has found its entrance into the automotive field as an efficient means to add some sporty sound components to vehicles with combustion engines. With the growing market share of hybrid and battery electric vehicles and the legal requirement to add artificial exterior sound with Acoustic Vehicle Alert Systems (AVAS), wider application scenarios open-up, and new skills, processes and tools are required to define, generate and implement these new types of sounds. A huge advantage is that Active Sound technologies allow a stringent implementation of a Brand Sound for the OEMs. This stringent implementation requires a corresponding Brand Sound approach to define and roll this concept out into various vehicle sounds, which will be presented. Today's applications of Active Sound Design require a flexible and comprehensive generation of different sound types for combustion and electric powertrain driven vehicles, so that the corresponding toolchain must be flexible, easy to edit, and of specific suitability for automotive applications. A major prerequisite is that the generated sounds are authentic, even though they are completely synthesized and may have a new unusual character. Several specific sound generation features are required to achieve this, and an efficient tuning to the dynamic vehicle parameters is mandatory. The developed toolchain which covers the complete range from Sound Design via vehicle tuning to mass production implementation will be presented, and several application examples for the support of combustion engines, interior electric vehicle sounds and exterior AVAS sounds will be demonstrated.