Psychological Methods for Evaluating Sound Quality and Assessing Acoustic Information

This paper reviews the psychological methods which are commonly used for evaluating sound quality and assessing acoustic information suitable for certain tasks. It first discusses definitions of and distinctions between the terms sensation, information, perception, and perceiving. Sound quality has three main aspects: (1) stimulus-response compatibility, (2) Pleasantness of sounds, and (3) identifiability of sounds or sound sources. In contrast to the large number of experiments concerning visual stimulus-response compatibility effects and their application to the design of man-machine systems, this topic has been neglected in sound quality research. The pleasantness aspect of sound design is commonly evaluated by means of unidimensional rating scales, and the identification aspect by means of decision times in recognition tasks and multidimensional scaling techniques as well. The paper concludes in presenting technical details of unidimensional and multidimensional scaling, especially of the widely used Semantic Differential.