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arXiv · 2603.07584

Analysis-Driven Procedural Generation of an Engine Sound Dataset with Embedded Control Annotations

Abstract

Computational engine sound modeling is central to the automotive audio industry, particularly for active sound design applications and virtual prototyping. Emerging data-driven engine sound synthesis methods require large volumes of standardized, clean audio recordings with precisely time-aligned operating-state annotations: data that is difficult to obtain due to high costs, specialized measurement equipment requirements, and inevitable noise contamination. We present an analysis-driven framework for generating engine audio with sample-accurate control annotations. The method extracts harmonic structures from real recordings through pitch-adaptive spectral analysis, which then drive an extended parametric harmonic-plus-noise synthesizer. With this framework, we augment 5-10 min of source audio per engine 15-30x via diverse control trajectories and parametric variation, producing the Procedural Engine Sounds Dataset (19.0 h, 5,935 files): a set of engine audio signals with sample-accurate RPM and torque annotations spanning a wide range of operating conditions, signal complexities, and harmonic profiles. Comparison against real recordings validates that the synthesized data preserves characteristic harmonic structures, and a baseline differentiable synthesis network trained on the dataset confirms its suitability for data-driven engine sound modeling. The dataset is released publicly to support research on engine timbre analysis, control parameter estimation, and neural generative synthesis.

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BibTeXRIS

Robin Doerfler, Lonce Wyse. 2026-06-02. Analysis-Driven Procedural Generation of an Engine Sound Dataset with Embedded Control Annotations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07584

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