Psychological Measurement for Sound Description and Evaluation 11
11 Psychological measurement for sound description and evaluation Patrick Susini,1 Guillaume Lemaitre,1 and Stephen McAdams2 1Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique Paris, France 2CIRMMT, Schulich School of Music, McGill University Montréal, Québec, Canada 11.1 Introduction Several domains of application require one to measure quantities that are representa- tive of what a human listener perceives. Sound quality evaluation, for instance, stud- ies how users perceive the quality of the sounds of industrial objects (cars, electrical appliances, electronic devices, etc.), and establishes specifications for the design of these sounds. It refers to the fact that the sounds produced by an object or product are not only evaluated in terms of annoyance or pleasantness, but are also important in people’s interactions with the object. Practitioners of sound quality evaluation therefore need methods to assess experimentally, or automatic tools to predict, what users perceive and how they evaluate the sounds. There are other applications requir- ing such measurement: evaluation of the quality of audio algorithms, management (organization, retrieval) of sound databases, and so on. For example, sound-database retrieval systems often require measurements of relevant perceptual qualities; the searching process is performed automatically using similarity metrics based on rel- evant descriptors stored as metadata with the sounds in the database. The “perceptual” qualities of the sounds are called the auditory attributes, which are defined as percepts that can be ordered on a magnitude scale. Historically, the notion of auditory attribute is grounded in the framework of psychoacoustics. Psychoacoustical research aims to establish quantitative relationships between the physical properties of a sound (i.e., the properties measured by the methods and instruments of the natural sciences) and the perceived properties of the sounds, the auditory attributes.
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