Detecting and Classifying Secondary Impacts in Door Closing Sound

One of the primary correlates to customer annoyance with door-closing sound is peak loudness. In addition, customer annoyance also increases with the existence of secondary impacts, such as rattles. While these secondary impacts are typically not seen in the time-varying loudness trace (or other common sound quality metrics), it is often possible to visually identify the impacts in a time-frequency display of the door-closing sound. But the reduction of this display information to a single-number objective metric that agrees with subjective assessments has previously proved elusive. This paper summarizes the recent development and application of an objective metric that agrees with subjective classifications of secondary impacts in door-closing sounds.