A Layer Model of Sound Quality

Sound quality is a complex and multilayered phenomenon. When analyzing or modeling the formation process of sound-quality judgments, a variety of quality elements and quality featureshave to be taken into account, whereby the actual relevance and salience of each of them is situation dependent. In the following we present some ideas with the aim of structuring the quality-formation process into different layers according to the amount of abstraction involved. Depending on the amount of abstraction, different sets of references and evaluation and assessment methods have to be employed.