Abstract
Product sound quality evaluation aims to identify relevant attributes and assess their influence on the overall auditory impression. This results in an accurate representation of the product in a singular modality - usually the one primarily associated with the product's main function. However, any given product is rarely perceived in isolation, but rather judged within a global context which includes information from all modalities (senses).
This PhD thesis investigates the relative importance of audio and visual information in subjective evaluations of a product. A multimodal setup was developed in a manner that allowed the subjective audiovisual evaluation of loudspeakers under controlled conditions. Additionally, unimodal audio and visual evaluations were used as a baseline for comparison. The same procedure was applied in the investigation of the validity of less than optimal stimuli presentations rather than of the actual product, in order to assess the necessary level of realism required in multimodal evaluations. Variations in the experimental design and experimental question were also explored.
The experiments provided evidence that unimodal evaluations can be misleading in the relative importance of each modality with respect to the overall quality evaluation. The results show that this was not due to specific interactions between stimuli but rather because the auditory modality dominated over the visual modality. Furthermore, for all experiments where less than optimal stimuli presentations were used the results obtained and overall conclusions drawn were comparable to the experiment with optimal presentation, thus indicating that the use of substitutes instead of actual products is valid.
This PhD thesis investigates the relative importance of audio and visual information in subjective evaluations of a product. A multimodal setup was developed in a manner that allowed the subjective audiovisual evaluation of loudspeakers under controlled conditions. Additionally, unimodal audio and visual evaluations were used as a baseline for comparison. The same procedure was applied in the investigation of the validity of less than optimal stimuli presentations rather than of the actual product, in order to assess the necessary level of realism required in multimodal evaluations. Variations in the experimental design and experimental question were also explored.
The experiments provided evidence that unimodal evaluations can be misleading in the relative importance of each modality with respect to the overall quality evaluation. The results show that this was not due to specific interactions between stimuli but rather because the auditory modality dominated over the visual modality. Furthermore, for all experiments where less than optimal stimuli presentations were used the results obtained and overall conclusions drawn were comparable to the experiment with optimal presentation, thus indicating that the use of substitutes instead of actual products is valid.
| Original language | English |
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| Place of Publication | Aalborg University |
| Publisher | |
| Print ISBNs | 978-87-92328-64-9 |
| Publication status | Published - 2011 |