he development of automotive audio systems is increasingly driven by the need to reduce late‑stage integration risk and to support earlier, more informed design decisions—often before physical prototypes are available. In parallel, objective audio quality and speech intelligibility metrics are being adopted more widely to complement and reduce reliance on subjective listening tests. Together, these trends motivate a shift toward system‑level modeling and simulation approaches that connect digital signal processing (DSP), electro-acoustic transducers, cabin acoustics, and human perception. This tutorial presents practical strategies for unifying simulations of audio DSP and acoustics in the context of automotive audio design using MATLAB and Simulink. Drawing on experience from collaborations across OEMs and the automotive supply chain, the tutorial discusses workflows that allow combinations of multiple model partitions—such as DSP algorithms, loudspeaker and transducer models, cabin acoustic representations, and psychoacoustic assessment—to coexist within unified time‑domain simulations. This enables engineers to better understand cross‑domain interactions and evaluate design tradeoffs earlier in the development process.
