Auralization of a car pass-by using impulse responses computed with the pseudospectral time-domain method

Car noise is the main environmental noise source in the urban environment. In this paper, a method for auralization of a car pass-by in a street from using a wave-based acoustic prediction method is explored. For the transfer paths between sound source locations and a listener, binaural impulse responses are computed with the pseudospectral time-domain method for various source locations. A dry synthesized car signal is convolved with the binaural impulse responses of the different locations in the street and cross-fade windows are used in order to make the transition between the source positions smooth and continuous. The auralizations are performed for the simplified scenarios where buildings are absent, and for an environment where a long building block is located behind the car. A subjective evaluation was carried out in order to detect the maximum spacing between the discrete source positions that still can produce a perceived continuous car pass-by auralization.