Auralization of a car pass-by using measured and simulated impulse responses

During the last decade, auralization of urban environments has gained a lot of popularity. In this paper, a methodology for the auralization of a car pass-by in a street canyon is presented. The binaural impulse responses (BIRs) have been obtained from measurements, and from simulations with a geometrical acoustics software based on an angular increment of 2° between the source and the receiver, with the source along a straight line located 3m from the receiver. A dry car signal is convolved with the BIRs that represent the discrete source positions of the moving car and cross-fade windows are used in order to make the transition between the source positions continuous. A same-different listening test was carried out in order to investigate if increasing the angular spacing between the discrete source positions affects the perception of the auralizations. Results are also compared against former experiments using the same methodology but for the simplified scenarios where buildings are absent and where a long building block is located behind the car. Results showed that subjects could detect the differences in the auralizations when the spacing was increased in the street canyon case much easier than in the simplified scenarios. Further research is needed to evaluate how plausible the auralizations with larger increment are compared to the auralizations with shorter increment.