International audienceThe paper presents a novel approach to include community noise considerations based on sound quality in Multidisciplinary Conceptual Design Optimization (MCDO) of civil transportation aircraft. The novelty stems from the use of an unconventional objective function, defined as a measure of the distance between the noise emission of the aircraft under analysis and a reference "weakly annoying" noise, the target sound. The minimization of such a merit factor yields an aircraft concept with a noise signature as close as possible to the given target. The reference sound is one of the outcomes of the European Research Project SEFA (Sound Engineering For Aircraft, VI Framework Programme, 2004-2007), and used here as an external input. The aim of the present work is to address the definition ad the inclusion of the sound-matching-based objective function in the MCDO of aircraft