Patent ID: 7274288

Claim:
A vehicle alarm sound output device for driving an alarm sound outputting unit on the basis of information from a condition detecting unit for detecting the condition of a vehicle or the surrounding condition around the vehicle to output an alarm sound comprising: a position setting unit for setting a localization position of a virtual sound source of the alarm sound in accordance with the detection result of the condition detecting unit; an alarm control unit for controlling the alarm sound output device so that a passenger of the vehicle can hear the alarm sound from the virtual sound source, wherein when there are plural contents to be alarmed to the passenger in connection with the detection result of the condition detecting unit, the localization position of the virtual sound source and the sound type of the alarm sound are altered for every content to be alarmed; a filter coefficient generator for generating virtual sound source filter coefficients in accordance with the localization positions of the plural virtual sound sources; and a calculator for converting each of the respective virtual sound source filter coefficients and the acoustic data of the alarm sound from the real-number value of a time domain to the complex-number value of a frequency domain by fast Fourier transform, generating plural virtual sound sources by complex-number calculation between each of the virtual sound source filter coefficient and the acoustic data of the alarm sound in the frequency domain, combining the plural virtual sound sources by complex-number addition, and converting the plural virtual sound sources thus combined from the complex-number value of the frequency domain to the real-number value of the time domain by inversed Fast Fourier Transform.