Relationship between hedonic preference and audio quality in tests of music production quality

Abstract

In many subjective listening tests, audio is evaluated on either “quality” or “preference”. These terms are often conflated. Little evidence has been gathered which explains the subtle differences between these terms in audio perception - we may not necessarily prefer high-quality audio samples. In the case of music, hedonic preference is strongly related to familiarity with the audio samples, which is informed by one's musical tastes, itself based on autobiographical memory. However, for unfamiliar music, the two concepts can overlap considerably. This paper will explore the relationship between these two concepts in three experiments - with familiar music, unfamiliar music and alternate mixes of an unfamiliar song. It was shown that quality ratings and like ratings become more correlated when familiarity is removed and also when inter-song variation is removed. For the case of music mixes, both concepts are strongly correlated (R2=0.82), although there are subtle differences in the ways these ratings were described by participants.