가전 제품의 음질 향상을 위한 음설계 연구

Sound Design to Improve the Quality of Noise from Home Appliances

For many years, engineers in the field of acoustics have used the A-weighted sound pressure level (SPL). Since they were interested just in a reduction of noise, the A-weighted SPL was considered good enough to quantify noise problems. This is reasonable because loudness is usually the most important parameter for most noise problems and A-weighted SPL is often reasonably well correlated with loudness. As the overall noise levels drop, however, other parameters become more important and must be considered, Advent of sound quality came from an understanding that A-weighted SPL only reflects the loudness of a sound. It is obviously impossible to characterize a complex sound with a single number. Although product mostly has revealed physical quantities created by the standpoint of engineers, consumers perceive and evaluate products on the non-physical characteristics, such as feelings, emotions, and experiences in different social and cultural situations. Especially, for the household appliances for instance air-conditioner or refrigerator, the sound is heavily related to the satisfaction of a customer who is a real user of the product and is very important factor to decide purchasing as well as visual design. Therefore, in this research, the general tendency of consumer's psychology was investigated for the appliances. And also, in order to obtain clear guidelines fur sound manipulation, the characteristics of the sound of air-conditioning systems and refrigerators were compared with competitors'. since it is important to overcome the discrepancy between engineering and marketing, the relevance of sound manipulation must be documented from the consumer's perspective. That is the reason why we conducted a consumer and marketing oriented study.