Consumer Sound

Søren Bech and Jon Francombe provide an illustration of how sensory analysis is undertaken in the audio industry. They demonstrate how the industry attempts to quantify the listener’s imagination—which is taken to include a range of modifiers of the listener’s auditory experience including mood, expectation, and previous experience—in order to ensure that the end result, the listener’s auditory experience or impression after the audio transmission chain, matches the intended experience as closely as possible. An example is provided of sensory analysis used for qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the listening experience in a personal sound zone. A perceptual model has been developed to reliably predict a listener’s sense of distraction (due to interfering audio) from the experience of listening to audio intended for a particular zone.