Evaluation And Analysis Of Car Horn Sound Quality

Car horns are indispensable electrical components in car’s safety system. They arewidely used by drivers. They have the capital and legal function of warning road usersagainst potential danger, The role of car horns’ sound hint and alert effect isirreplaceable. But car horns sound also produces negative influence on people’s dailylife, while it playing a positive role at security in safe driving and avoiding of trafficaccidents. if we can improve the sound quality of car horns sound without changing itsbasic function. It could greatly improve people’s living environment and marketcompetitiveness of cars’ brand.Many departments in domestic and abroad have been tried their best to improvehorns’ sound effect and reduce the pollution of ca horns’ sound, such as regulationrestraint, modulation of horns’ structure, but the result is not significant. The research ofsound quality of car horns which is an essential way to solve the problems, because it isa method that corresponding human feeling about products’ sound feature. This paperapplies the research of sound quality to evaluate and analyze car horns’ sound. The maincontents including：1) According to the national standard GB15742-2006, horns’ sound quality tests of13different types of passenger vehicles were conducted through two positions of30°right in front and direct in front of cars, and national standard verification were carriedout to the sound samples. Then the time and frequency domain were analysed, andcomparison analysis and multi-parameters difference analysis to different positions’objective parameter were accomplished.2) subjective evaluation vocabularies which suit for car horns’ sound wereestablished through investigation. And then the subjective evaluation tests wereconducted by paired comparison method and semantic differential method. A subjectiveevaluation software which is easy to operate and data process was developed onLabVIEW software platform. It showed that the program not only reduced theoperators’ evaluation difficulty, but also got high data consistency coefficient.3) Reliability and consistency of testing data was analyzed, and then statisticanalysis and comparison analysis were carried out to the reliable and effective test data.The combination of the subjective and objective evaluation method was used to built thesubjective preference evaluation model for horns’ sound quality, the evaluated result showed that the main factor of subjective preference is sharpness.4) Cluster analysis was used to classify the sound simples, and typical simpleswere selected from each type of sound simples. Comparison analysis of specificloudness was carried out according to the scoring value of subjective preference resultof these typical simples, in the last, we’ve found the distribution feature of frequencywhich can affects human’s feeling about the sound of car horn. The results showed thatthe simples with proper roughness and lower sharpness and loudness can be more easilyaccepted by people, and the car horn’ sound energy concentrate upon the lowerfrequency part(400-1800Hz) on the basis of requirement of standard can get bettersound quality.