Proc. of the 10th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research, Marseille, France, October 15-18, 2013 How Much Does Audio Quality Influence Ratings of Overall Listening Experience? Michael Schoeffler, Bernd Edler and J¨urgenHerre International Audio Laboratories Erlangen
[email protected] Abstract. Researchers, developers and manufacturers put a lot of ef- fort into improving the audio quality of their products but little is known about the overall resulting effect on the individual customer. An experi- ment with 34 participants was conducted with the purpose to investigate the relationship between audio quality and overall listening experience in more detail. When rating the overall listening experience, participants are allowed to take every aspect into account which is important to them, including their taste in music. The participants rated the overall listen- ing experience of short music excerpts in different levels of bandwidth degradation. The result analysis revealed that listening to a song which is liked was slightly more important than the provided audio quality when participants rated the music excerpts. Nevertheless, audio quality was an important factor for less-liked songs to get higher ratings than more-liked songs with low or medium audio quality. Keywords: Overall Listening Experience, Quality of Experience, Audio Quality 1 Introduction The purpose of the experiment presented in this paper is to find out how impor- tant audio quality is for enjoying music. The term \overall listening experience" is used for describing the listener's enjoyment when listening to a music excerpt. When the overall listening experience is rated, listeners can take every aspect into account which seems important to them.