Railway rolling noise is typically described in equivalent pass-by noise levels. However, this descriptor does not always sufficiently correlate with the perceived annoyance of, for example, tonal components or transient effects. An auralization of such effects allows researching this correlation.

The wheels mainly contribute to the overall noise level above 1 kHz. Wheel vibration is dominated by strong modes due to its typically low damping. Typically, modes with a strong axial response to a vertical excitation in the wheel-rail contact dominate the radiated sound. The lateral position of this contact point on the wheel tread, and thus the modal excitation, is an important parameter in an auralization. However, the exact contact location varies due to the hunting motion of the wheelset and is rarely known in practice.

This paper presents a computationally efficient, time-domain prediction model for the sound pressure produced by the pass-by of a single wheel at a stationary track-side position. The model uses precalculated acoustic transfer functions for each mode, which allow an evaluation of the modal contributions to the track-side sound pressure. The sensitivity of these modal contributions on the lateral contact position is analyzed.