Sound quality cannot be assessed except through psychophysical experiments with human subjects

Evidence

Sound quality is primarily subjective. The most reliable method to study an informative feature or the a esthetic value of a sound is to conduct psychophysical experiments with a group of human subjects, or assessors. Often, this is an implicit activity, like in engineering prototyping or product development, where engineers apply their intuitive or introspective knowledge on what constitutes quality of sound. Sometimes the attributes of sound that make it high quality are obvious and sometimes not. In general, understanding the relations between attributes of physical sound and sound quality requires systematic experimentation and statistical analysis of the gathered data. When optimizing the sound quality of a product for a specific market, an extensive experimental basis is necessary. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2331

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes sound quality as fundamentally subjective and defines how it is studied.
• XREF: connects to: Judged pleasantness does not track the physical quality of a sound — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 1078; Physical sound measurement cannot capture the subjective semantic meaning of a sonic environment — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 1159; High-quality sonic ambience literally increases human acoustic perceptual capacity — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 1156 (+1 more)