Auditory representations of transients : the importance of phase in the analysis of rattle events

Engineering the sound quality of an automobile has drawn upon well known perceptual studies of loudness to set design targets for various noise sources, such as wind and power train. Attempts to apply these studies to design target specifications for squeak and rattle noises have met with limited success, primarily because the perceptual response to transient signals differs in several important dimensions from the response to wideband, steady-state noises, where the phase spectrum, for example, contributes little. We present psychophysical results that detail how the perception of a transient’s magnitude spectrum can be affected by its phase spectrum, introduce a computational auditory model, and demonstrate the model’s use in visualizing the transient events.