Abstract: Current active sound quality control systems just control psychoacoustic parameters, thus their ability of improving sound quality is insufficient. A new active sound quality control based on auditory sensing strategy is proposed. To incorporate nonlinear auditory characteristics into the new system, an auditory sensing model including outer/middle ear model and inner ear model is established. To take into account the feedback effect of hair cells on the motion of basilar membrane during modeling basilar membrane, the gammatone filter band with time-varying bandwidth is used, which can simulate the nonlinear characteristics of hearing perception in frequency and intensity. By using auditory sensing strategy, the system objective is changed from minimizing sound pressure to minimizing auditory signal. Furthermore, the control structure and algorithm for the new system are developed. To solve the problem of computational complexity and slow convergence speed caused by the adding of auditory sensing module, an auditory control algorithm which base on filtered-x least mean square algorithm and combine the delay-compensated structure with inverse model structure is proposed. Active control of a noise recorded in a car with speed of 50km/h is simulated and sound qualities before and after active control are compared and analyzed. It is indicated that auditory signal control can achieve better auditory comfort than sound pressure control.

Key words: sound quality, active control, auditory sensing