Perception of audio quality in productions of popular music

Wilson, AD; Fazenda, BM

Abstract

The quality of recorded music is often highly disputed. To gain insight into the dimensions
of quality perception, subjective and objective evaluation of musical programme material,
extracted from commercial CDs, was undertaken. It was observed that perception of audio
quality and liking of the music can be affected by separate factors. Familiarity with stimuli
affected like ratings while quality ratings were most associated with signal features related
to perceived loudness and dynamic range compression. The effect of listener expertise was
small. Additionally, the sonic attributes describing quality ratings were gathered and indicate
a diverse lexicon relating to timbre, space, defects and other concepts. The results also suggest
that, while the perceived quality of popular music may have decreased over recent years, like
ratings were unaffected.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 14, 2015
• Publication Date: Feb 5, 2016
• Deposit Date: Dec 15, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 5, 2016
• Journal: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
• Print ISSN: 1549-4950
• Publisher: Audio Engineering Society
• Volume: 64
• Issue: 1/2
• Pages: 23-34
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2015.0090
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2015.0090
• Related Public URLs: http://www.aes.org/journal/