Sound quality research with TWO!EARS

A Raake, H Wierstorf, C Hold, J Skowronek, "Sound quality research with TWO!EARS," in Fortschritte der Akustik - DAGA 2017, (2017).

Bibtex

@misc{Raake2017a,
    title     = {{Sound quality research with TWO!EARS}},
    author    = {Raake, Alexander and Wierstorf, Hagen and Hold, Christoph
                 and Skowronek, Janto},
    booktitle = {Fortschritte der Akustik - DAGA 2017},
    publisher = {DEGA e.V.},
    address   = {Kiel, Germany},
    month     = {March},
    year      = {2017}
}

Abstract

The paper presents an overview of the work conducted in the EC-funded FET-Open project TWO!EARS. Starting from general considerations of audio quality assessment, the overall TWO!EARS system architecture as available at the end of the project is presented (www.twoears.eu). The open-source testbed framework enables the scenario-based testing of different bottom-up and top-down auditory modelling modules in the context of differently complex auditory perception and scene analysis tasks. Here, sound quality assessment represents one of the proof-of-concept applications. The paper provides a summary of the different sound quality assessment campaigns conducted in the project. These started with a sound-quality paradigm based on localization and coloration for different audio reproduction and sound-field synthesis techniques such as stereo and Wave Field Synthesis. For the assessment of sound quality in terms of preference for different system configurations, the problem of appropriate reference signals was addressed by creating dedicated mixes. For these, different parametric settings of individual mixing steps were used. The resulting mixes were assessed in different tests using a paired-comparison preference paradigm with presentation over different spatial audio reproduction systems. The test results and available modelling approaches are discussed, as well as future research to be carried out using the TWO!EARS modelling framework.