Words4EV.speak 1.0 (en)

Words4EV.speak (fr) or 'how do acousticians talk about sounds of the electric vehicle'

This lexicon illustrates le 11 more representative sounds of the electric car cabin. The representativity of a sound is determined by analysis of interviews carried with a group of 12 acousticians working at Renault on the basis of their memories. The subject was the electric car cabin soundscape description and its comfort.

This lexicon offers a definition for each of the identified sounds, containing 3 distinct elements:

• A reduced description dealing with acoustic properties regardless of the context.
• An hedonic description describing the emotion or the judgment induced by a sound relating to its context.
• A causal description giving a few simple technical elements to identify the origin of a sound.

Definitions are illustrated through audio sample divided in 4 categories:

• Contextualized: An audio recorded in a coherent context, possibly making the sound difficult to detect, but getting close from the user experience of such a sound.
• Decontextualized: an audio recorder out of its context, either by numerical treatment or experimental means, aiming at isolate a specific sound.
• Synthesis: Sound synthesis aiming at mocking-up a sound by acting solely on its specific characteristics identified (pitch, emergence-MF-HF, harmonic, modulation, fluctuation and directivity), named ‘essential synthesis’.
• Origins: audio sample not related to automotive field, reminding the origin or the name of a sound, which can enable to capture essence and characteristic of a sound.

Definitions have been built in accordance with the vocabulary used by participants to maintain a coherence between the lexicon and the field he would likely be useful: automotive field. The aim is to explicit how do acoustician talk about the vehicle and sounds. We present additional elements here bringing more context to the most frequently used adjectives describe sounds. Those adjectives could establish the link between this lexicon and the Words4sound.speak (eng) lexicon:

Emergent: describe a sound standing out from a broad band noise.

Broad band : Describe a sound having a wide frequency width. It is often useful to describe the frequency width and frequency range of value.

LF, MF, HF: Range of value of a sound, Low, Medium or high frequency. Those descriptors refer more to the frequency spectrum more than the sound pitch. Frequency ranges do not have precise value, but one can consider that LF ~ [20 – 200] Hz, MF ~ [200-2000], HF ~ [2000-20 000]Hz.

Motor-Harmonic: Describe a sound, often emergent, with a pitch proportional to the engine rotation per minutes. A motor-harmonic sound is not necessarily harmonic from a mathematical point of view.

Modulant: Describe a sound with a property, such a pitch or level oscillating with time, rather regularly.

Fluctuant: Describe a sound with a property, such a pitch or level oscillating with time, rather irregularly or randomly

Directive: Describe a sound we can easily localize by ear, “localized” could be used as a synonym here.

reference :

Duroyon, M., Misdariis, N., Susini, P., Dauchez, N., Pardo, L. F., & Vialatte, E. (2023, September). How do Automotive Acousticians talk about Sounds and Comfort in Electric Vehicle?. In 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association Forum Acusticum 2023 (pp. 6335-6342). European Acoustics Association.