Sound Intensity Levels and Estimation for Noise Control Evaluations of Drones (SILENCED)

This database was created at the Institute of Communication Systems (IKS) at RWTH Aachen University (Germany).

Measurement Setup

One set of measurements were conducted in a controlled indoor environment following the ITU-R BS.1116-2 base reference (IKS | Lab) and another in a hemi-anechoic chamber using DPA 4061 condenser microphones at a sampling rate of 48 kHz. The rotating blades of a DJI mini 2 SE quadrocopter drone were used as the primary sound source, fixed in place by a device attached to the top of its chassis. Five Fostex 6301b loudspeakers were used as secondary sources in another measurement.

Microphone Placement

A reference microphone was placed on the underside of the drone chassis. A rotatable linear microphone array consisting of six individual microphones was placed 159 cm in IKS | Lab and 4 m in the hemi-anechoic chamber below the drone.

Loudspeaker Placement

The five speakers formed a cross-shaped array with a center speaker directly under the drone facing the ground. One speaker was placed on each side of the center speaker, also facing the ground, but angled about 30° away from the center.

File Structure

The raw data and estimated paths are saved as individual MAT files for the drone and loudspeaker measurements, respectively. This file format supports multidimensional arrays (tensors) and can be used with MATLAB® and free software, such as SciPy. More information about the dimensions of the data can be found in "info.txt".

Additional information is contained in the 'meta' fields of some MAT files. The data from the hemi-anechoic chamber is also provided in the NETCDF file format which has named dimensions and coordinates and additional meta data.

For a more detailed explanation, we refer the reader to the documentation that is part of the published data.

This database was presented at Forum Acusticum / Euronoise 2025, the 11th EAA Annual European Conference on Acoustics and Noise Control Engineering. If you wish to use the database in your research, please cite the corresponding paper as:

Steiner, J. and Hilgemann, F. and Jax, P., "Empirical Study on Active Noise Control in UAVs", in Proceedings of the 11th Convention of the European Acoustics Association, Malaga, Spain, June 2025.