Sound pleasantness of electrically adjustable exterior mirrors in vehicles

The present work focuses on studying the behaviour of electrically adjustable exterior mirrors in vehicles. In order to analyse the noise produced by this kind of devices, four different samples were measured in a semi-anechoic chamber. To establish the pleasantness descriptor of the samples, sixty-two subjects were exposed to an auditory test using two different methods: paired comparison and ranking procedure. The experiments were carried out in three different laboratories: University of Kyushu in Japan (JP), University of Coimbra in Portugal (PT) and University of Alicante in Spain (SP); leading to a cross-cultural study. The results showed a great similarity between the preferences obtained by the two methods.