Living quality perception in urban environments is closely linked to acoustical factors. With traffic being the most dominating source of environmental noise, current research associates exposure to traffic noise with a variety of negative effects on human health and well-being. In response to these concerns, the „Environmental Noise Directive“ implemented by the European Union in 2002, obliges EU countries to prepare and publish noise maps and noise management plans. However, the description of noise by means of equivalent noise levels (used in noise mapping) is often not sufficient in fully characterizing the human response to noise, since population-reported annoyance ratings are more complex and depend, among other factors, on their psychoacoustical perception too.

Beyond the scope of noise mapping, auralization is a suitable technique to assess environmental noise in virtual reality by producing audible sound from numerical or analytical data. The auralization chain consists of physics-based models of sound sources, wave propagation and the receiver. The objective of this thesis is to characterize, model and implement road-traffic and air-traffic sound sources, striving to achieve a holistic auditory fit of urban auralizations with the real-world experience. The characterization of moving sound sources is technically challenging, since in addition to the scope of sound source models for noise mapping by means of adequate spectral representation and directivity patterns, sound sources for use in virtual acoustics must also take into account the temporal dimension and represent the operating state of a sound source.

This thesis advances measurement, modeling and synthesis techniques of traffic sound sources. It systematically obtains spatial and spectro-temporal characteristics, introduces methods for signal extraction, and provides algorithmic details for sound synthesis implementation. Additionally, it discusses the calibrated integration and evaluation of these techniques within a real-time auralization framework.

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