Extraction of auditory features and elicitation of attributes for the assessment of multichannel reproduced sound

The identification of relevant auditory attributes is pivotal in sound quality evaluation. Two fundamentally different psychometric methods were employed to uncover perceptually relevant auditory features of multichannel reproduced sound. In the first method, called repertory and technique (RGT), subjects were asked to assign verbal labels directly to the features when encountering them, and to subsequently rate the sounds on the scales thus obtained. The second method, perceptual structure analysis (PSA), required the subjects to consistently use the perceptually relevant features in triadic comparisons, without having to assign them a verbal label; given sufficient consistency, a lattice representation-as frequently used in formal concept analysis (FCA)-can be derived to depict the structure of auditory features.