Sound quality judgments depend on listener context and expectations

Evidence

The theory of psychoacoustics, discussed in Chapter 8, uses the human as a simple metering device, where sound events evoke auditory events with attributes that can be measured using psychoacoustic techniques. In psychoacoustics, expectations, mood, and other cognitive factors of individual subjects are minimized when the values of attributes are measured. In the context of sound quality, cognitive factors can no longer be disregarded, since ‘quality of sound’ means the suitability of a sound to a specific situation, and such suitability cannot be judged without cognitive functions. The same sound may produce different sound quality in different contexts, depending on the mode of operation and the expectations of a subject. For example, higher intelligibility of speech improves the sound quality in mobile phones, but the ability of a worker to concentrate in an open-plan office is impaired by intelligible speech from neighbouring cubicles. The properties of sound can thus have either negative or positive effects on sound quality. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2313

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Chapter 8 psychoacoustics stripping out cognitive factors, and to the reader’s broader interest in acoustic communication applications — the same signal (intelligible speech) flips valence by context. — connects to: Judged pleasantness does not track the physical quality of a sound — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 1078; Whether a sound counts as noise depends on subjective interpretation, not acoustics — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 1025; Soundscape quality depends on wanted-versus-unwanted context, not decibel level — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 1452 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2313
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source