Perception & Evaluation of Audio Quality in Music Production
A dataset of audio clips was prepared and audio quality assessed by subjective testing. Encoded as digital signals, a large amount of feature-extraction was possible. A new objective metric is proposed, describing the Gaussian nature of a signal’s amplitude distribution. Correlations between objective measurements of the music signals and the subjective perception of their quality were found. Existing metrics were adjusted to match quality perception. A number of timbral, spatial, rhythmic and amplitude measures, in addition to predictions of emotional response, were found to be related to the perception of quality. The emotional features were found to have most importance, indicating a connection between quality and a unified set of subjective and objective parameters.