Audio codec testing requires methods that reveal unknown perceptual attributes

Evidence

The previous sections discussed listening tests, where it is often implicitly assumed that the difference between auditory events is in a single auditory attribute, such as in loudness or pitch. As will be discussed later in the context of sound quality, the auditory events studied may differ from each other in multiple dimensions, for example in both loudness and pitch. The situation becomes even more challenging if the attributes are not known a priori. For example, when perceptually motivated audio codecs are developed, and different versions of the codecs are tested, the listeners may perceive changes in ‘crispness’, ‘noisiness’, and ‘loudness’. Descriptive sensory analysis is a family of methods which targets revealing the palette of attributes of a given set of stimuli, and in some cases also scaling (or grading) the stimuli in the attribute dimensions. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 930

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces descriptive sensory analysis as a method family for mapping unknown perceptual attribute palettes.
• SHARE: Relevant to someone working on audio codec evaluation — mentions ‘crispness’, ‘noisiness’, ‘loudness’ as emergent listener attributes.