The detection and ratings of impulses can be used in wide fields within the industry. An engineer working with detecting impulses and reducing unwanted sounds in consumer products, most prominent job is to prevent all annoying sounds as impulses to be perceived by the costumer. Sound quality is a part of the total product quality.

In the area of NVH engineering they are often dealt with detecting and eliminate Buzz, Squeak and Rattle (BSR) events in vehicles.

Many attempts has been done in order to automatic detect BSR events and often the detection threshold is depending on an absolute level determined by a subjective evaluation or set manually by the authors.

In this project an algorithm independent of absolute level has been chosen to calculate the amount of impulsiveness of an acoustic signal.

Synthetically generated samples consisting of impulses mixed with noise were used as stimuli to the proposed algorithm. Concurrently the same set of samples has been evaluated in a subjective experiment. Existing literature does not describe a similar study of impulses with the mentioned parameters, conducted in a subjective experiment. That was the motivation to explore the described scenario.

The goal of the project was to reveal if any correlation existed between the objective and subjective evaluation of the samples.

No significant correlation was found between the two. Future work suggest to tune the settings in the algorithm to evaluate if an improvement can be achieved that match the subjective results with a higher degree of correlation.