Tapping into the personal experience of quality: Expectation-based Sound Quality evaluation

This paper addresses the role of expectation for product Sound Quality evaluation. In two different experiments it was shown that expectations (induced by priming tasks or as mood) systematically influenced how sounds are perceived. Moreover, temporary influences such as mood interacted with more stable individual differences such as noise sensitivity. These findings suggest that sound quality evaluation in variant across people and that both research and applications needs to consider subjective expectations to fully understand how the concept of quality in constructed.