AUDITORY EVALUATION OF SOUNDS RADIATED FROM A VIBRATING PLATE INSIDE A DAMPED CAVITY: ADJUSTMENT OF THE COMPUTATIONAL EFFORTS IN FREQUENCY

The present investigation deals with the optimization of the vibroacoustic computational effort towards perceptual constraints. This is carried out considering the academic case of a vibrating plate coupled with a damped cavity. The study looks into a particularly restrictive parameter inherent in the computation in frequency of prediction tools: the maximum limit frequency. This parameter is aimed at being adjusted to an optimal value which allows the qualitative trends concerning the optimal structural design of the system to be kept. These qualitative trends are originally obtained from the auditory evaluation of real sounds. The real sounds correspond to the noise radiated from the plate inside the cavity, recorded in different structural configurations of the system. These configurations involve the controlled variation of three structural parameters: the cavity sound absorption properties, the plate thickness and tightening conditions. The real sounds are first pairwise submitted to listeners who are asked to give dissimilarity and preference judgments. The reference qualitative trends are then established, in terms of perceptual space, preference space and preference ranking. Afterwards, the adjustment process consists in finding out, from a low-pass filtering applied to the recorded sounds, an optimal cut-off frequency which allows the reference qualitative trends to be preserved. 1