Concepts in Sound Quality

It is the purpose of the first part of the talk to point out the position of psychoacoustics in the concert of sciences and arts. In doing so, a stringently phenomenal view will be presented in form of a line of arguments that is solely based on actual perception and not on fiction. In this way, the place and role of subjectivity in acoustics and audio engineering will be determined. Virtual reality will be used as an illustrating example.

The second part of the talk starts with the introduction of the “character” of sounds and then moves on to different aspects of sound “quality”, for example, product-sound quality, auditory-scene quality, sound quality as such, and sound-transmission quality. Consequently, a system-oriented approach toward sound-quality evaluation is introduced - with the aim of making audio engineers aware of the various components and processes involved in the formation of sound quality.

Special effort is put into an attempt to discuss the different aspects of sound quality in a concerted way, such as to show that the general procedure in which sound quality is formed is relatively invariant across specific applications. Rather, it is predominantly the character of the references of the quality judgement that requires adaptation to specific applications and users at issue. In this way one arrives at the structure of a model of the processes involved in sound-quality evaluation and assessment that can take subjectivity into proper account.

The third part of the talk deals exemplarily with sound quality in spaces for musical performances. Once again, the question of proper references turns out to be crucial for any further analysis. Consequently, efforts have to be taken to explore and assess these references systematically. To this end, a hierarchical order for references, based on the amount of abstraction, is proposed and discussed in some detail. Issues like typicalness, functional adequacy, aesthetic form, and tradition are touched upon. Finally, an architecture for a universal quality recognizer is proposed.