Abstract
Road-vehicle noise samples generated by common vehicles under various operating conditions were replayed using headphones. Ten subjects were instructed to describe and quantify their subjective responses to the noises. A wealth of numerical perceptual information was obtained and investigated by principal component analysis. Based on the human auditory-brain system theory, the physical factors extracted from the autocorrelation function (ACF) of binaural signals were calculated so as to explain the possible original sensations and representative auditory properties of road-vehicles sounds. Three primary auditory sensations—loudness, pitch and timbre have been acquired by applying PCA to the ACF factors extracted from 232 noise samples. There certainly exist elementary factors to quantify various auditory sensations. Noises possessed different ACF properties usually induced dissimilar perceptions with distinct essential auditory attributes, which would control or determine its auditory impression.