Psychoacoustics and Sound Quality

In this chapter psycho-physical methods which are useful for both psycho-acoustics and sound-quality engineering will be discussed, namely, the methods of random access, the semantic differential, category scaling and magnitude estimation. Models of basic psycho-acoustic quantities like loudness, sharpness and roughness as well as composite metrics like psycho-acoustic annoyance will be introduced, and their application to sound-quality design will be explained. For some studies on sound quality the results of auditory evaluations will be compared to predictions from algorithmic models. Further, influences of the image of brand names as well as of the meaning of sound on sound-quality evaluation will be reported. Finally, the effects of visual cues on sound-quality ratings will be mentioned.