Synthesising the sound of a car engine based on envelope decomposition and overlap smoothing

The synthesised sound of a car engine is used to alert people to the approach of an electric vehicle, to personalise the sound of an engine and for virtual reality. A methodology for synthesising engine sound based on concatenating samples is proposed. First, using filtering, the engine sound is decomposed into a combination of low-frequency harmonics that depend on the engine speed and high-frequency narrowband amplitude-modulated signals. The high-frequency signals are modulated by the harmonics that depend on the engine speed. The carrier and envelope of the amplitude-modulated signal are extracted with a Hilbert transform. The decomposed segments are concatenated by overlap smoothing. All the concatenated segments are assembled to form a synthesised sound. Finally, the synthesised sound is evaluated using the cepstrum distance and subjective auditory experiment, and it is compared with the raw engine sound and other synthesised sound.

Automated summary

This study proposes a method for synthesising engine sound based on concatenating samples, modulating the decomposed segments, and evaluating the synthesised sound through subjective auditory experiments. The results show that the synthesised sound, to some extent, can replace the raw engine sound.