Psychoacoustics and their Influence on a Driver

The Driving Experiment

This driving experiment involves driving a vehicle with microphones, cameras, and a CAN bus to capture data and create a data set of these drives. We will create our own scenarios of a “traffic jam” using other vehicles and use pedestrians on the sidewalk to simulate a regular day. We will have these auxiliary subjects create noise by either honking or yelling to simulate other sorts of scenarios that can be seen while driving.

Data Analysis and Goals

Once the data is collected, we will be able to calculate the psychoacoustic annoyance levels of the sound. Once we calculate such annoyances, we will use the visual data to localize the annoyances. The ultimate goal of this project is to train a network for an autonomous vehicle to take the necessary actions to lower the annoyance levels in a drive. This technology would allow us to have a more pleasant experience when being chauffeured by an autonomous vehicle.