Ercan Altinsoy

Evaluation of electric vehicle sounds, new concepts regarding speed-dependency and prediction of the warning effect

In today’s urban environment inhabitants are permanently exposed to elevated noise levels, which are mostly dominated by traffic noise. The current electrification of vehicles might affect the traffic noise in cities. The aim of this work was to determine the pedestrian reaction, the annoyance and the warning effect of electric vehicle sounds. For this purpose the differences in the perceived annoyance, warning effect and detection time were investigated with perception studies. Furthermore the sound level of a full speed-scaling of an approaching vehicle starting from 0 km/h at the critical distance is nearly 10 dB below the level of a constant speed of 10 km/h. Therefore variants of electric vehicle sounds were generated, in which a constant level is used below 5 or 10 km/h. The results show that the change of the speed-scaling influences the detection time enormously. In this study, artificial neural network (ANN) is used as an indexing tool to imitate subjective perceptions, because in some further wo...

A Structuralistic Approach to Acoustic‐Auditory Functions of Meaning

In this paper we introduce a methodology of semio‐acoustics to get information on how human listeners associate meaning to acoustic‐auditory events. We concentrate on identifying cues in the auditory stream listeners base the association of meaning on as well on modelling major characteristics of the reference system of meaning. The methodology we use is closely related to structuralism, an approach that has its origins in semiotics. In principle, structuralism differentiates between creating functions, carrying functions and changing functions of systems of meaning. We concentrate on carrying and changing functions here using the following procedure: a sign‐carrier (in our case an acoustic‐auditory event the association of meaning is based on) is decomposed into sub‐units. By a minimal pair analysis we investigate carrying and changing functions of acoustic‐auditory features with regard to the associated meaning. We will introduce the methodology used and discuss first results of a pilot study.