Methods for the assessment of pleasantness in sound quality

Abstract

Recently, listener tests of certain products have shown that the sense of pleasantness is significant in sound quality evaluation. For instance, pleasantness was an attribute frequently selected by subjects in the free word description of vacuum cleaner sounds. However, the relationship between the sense of pleasantness and psychoacoustic metrics is specific for each product. Present predicting models of pleasantness are not always suitable and have certain limitations, hence a new model of pleasantness was developed in our research. The development was based on the evaluation of specific products (vacuum cleaners and computer fans). The new model was then applied in two cases: first, for the evaluation of vacuum cleaners, which strongly correlated with the psychoacoustic metrics. Equally, the new model can be applied to a product for which the correlation coefficients between the standard psychoacoustic metrics and pleasantness were not significant (in this paper, the evaluation of computer fans). © 2010 Institute of Noise Control Engineering.

Towards an European Sound Label for Household Appliances: Psychoacoustical Aspects and Challenges

“…The results show that psychoacoustic metrics such as loudness, sharpness, tonality and roughness play an important role on the annoyance perception of the vacuum cleaner sounds. This observation is in line with the previous studies [3,4,5]. Furthermore the speech intelligibility, which can be described using the articulation index, is an important factor for the modeling the annoyance of the household appliance sounds.…”

“…In this study, we focused on bagged canister type vacuum cleaners. Altinsoy et al [3], Ih et al [4] and Róbert et al [5] investigated the perceptual aspects of the vacuum cleaner sounds. All these investigations showed that sound pressure level is not sufficient to characterize the perception of vacuum cleaner sounds.…”

Influence of hearing attitude difference on sound quality evaluation of vacuum cleaner sound

“…Such vacuum cleaners have become more popular recently. Both cleaning performance and quietness are important features of these vacuum cleaners [4][5][6][7][8][9] because they are sometimes used when residents are stay at home and the sound may disturb oral communication [10]. On the other hand, the hearing condition for RVCs is different from that for conventional vacuum cleaners.…”

Procesado Tiempo-Frecuencia: Aplicación a la percepción humana del sonido

“…Pero la combinación del Loudness, Sharpness, Fluctuation Strength y Roughness para conformar esta "calificación global del grado de molestia o agrado" puede variar entre distintas familias de productos [14,15], por lo que también se han desarrollado calificaciones globales asociadas a un determinado tipo de producto. En este sentido podemos encontrar: un índice de molestia (annoyance index) [16] y un valor de agrado (pleasantness) [16] desarrollado para aspiradoras, un índice de molestia desarrollado por la compañía AVL para ruidos de motor [17], o un índice de molestia específicamente diseñado para motores diesel [18].…”

“…La industria, con el fin de mejorar el sonido de sus productos, necesita valorar la molestia que producen, y para esto existen dos opciones: realizar una evaluación de los sonidos por parte de un grupo de expertos o consumidores (test de jurado) o desarrollar sistemas automáticos que proporcionen una medida de esta molestia [12]. Dentro del segundo grupo encontramos medidas calculadas en función de los parámetros psicoacústicos anteriores [3,13,14,15,16,17,18], pero cada una de estas medidas debe de desarrollarse para un tipo de producto en concreto. En el caso de la industria automovilística, el Roughness es uno de los parámetros más influyentes en la valoración de la molestia producida el ruido asociado al motor y otras partes de los vehículos [19,20,21,22,23,24].…”