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Auralization is key in developing a better understanding of how significant changes or infrastructure planning in our urban environment can have an impact on our related environmental soundscape. It allows consultants, planners and other stakeholders to hear the potential acoustic changes that might result, so that designs might be better optimized; it is also a valuable dissemination tool for informing the public as to the nature of such changes. Auralization also facilitates subjective soundscape assessment of proposed developments at the design stage and once construction is complete, smart sensor networks enable soundscape monitoring and objective evaluated on an ongoing basis. Of particular interest is sound emitted from transportation, as it is generally considered as unwanted sound and hence defined as noise. Transportation noise and road traffic noise in particular, is considered a concern for public health by the WHO, and annoyance with some aspect of our daily soundscape is not uncommon. This work presents an overview of how auralization has been used in the context of some recent transportation noise related case studies. The complete auralization chain is presented including source measurement and soundscape monitoring, sound propagation modeling using numerical simulation, soundfield rendering, and the potential for immersive multimodal presentation.

The spatial high-frequency extrapolation method extrapolates low-frequency band-limited spatial room impulse responses (SRIRs) to higher frequencies based on a frame-by-frame time/frequency analysis that determines directional reflected components within the SRIR. Such extrapolation can be used to extend finite-difference time domain (FDTD) wave propagation simulations, limited to only relatively low frequencies, to the full audio band. For this bandwidth extrapolation, a boundary absorption weighting function is proposed based on a parametric approximation of the energy decay relief of the SRIR used as the input to the algorithm. Results using examples of both measured and FDTD simulated impulse responses demonstrate that this approach can be applied successfully to a range of acoustic spaces. Objective measures show a close approximation to reverberation time and acceptable early decay time values. Results are verified through accompanying auralizations that demonstrate the plausibility of this approach when compared to the original reference case.