The sound quality of technical products is an increasingly important quality criterion and has a significant
influence on the product acceptance. But sound quality does not only depend on the physical attributes of the
sound signal. It is defined to a large extent by human sound and noise perception. This perception is based on
a physiological and psychological signal processing. These aspects depend on complex properties of the
physical signal like the spectral distribution and a relative comparison. However, today the sound design of
gearboxes is mainly based on the physical reduction of the noise level that is detected by absolute and
objectivized parameters. The noise oriented gear design is based on physical key parameters like the
reduction of transmission error in compliance with achievable manufacturing tolerances. Nevertheless, these
design rules may lead to a minimal sound pressure level but cannot solely be applied for an optimal sound
quality in every case. Under economic and technical aspects there is no excitation free gear set. Furthermore,
modern tendencies such as lightweight design and masking noise reduction (engine downsizing and
electrification) lead more and more to scenarios where the sound of a gear set, which is only designated to
have low transmission error, can be perceived as annoying. This requires design guidelines which take also
the human related aspects of gear noise into account. Nowadays the gear design does not yet consider
human noise perception sufficiently.

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