Reconstruction of perceived quality of an acoustical event using its verbal descriptions

The article contains the results of an experimental study aimed to investigate possibilities of reconstruction of perceived quality of an acoustical event on the basis of its verbal descriptions. Six sounds of car doors when being closed were used as a stimulus material. In the first experiment, participants had to orally describe similarities and differences of sounds presented in pairs. Verbalizations obtained in the experiment were used to create the so called «verbal portraits» containing six characteristics of the doors' sounds. The second experiment had 2 series. In the first one, pairs of sounds were presented simultaneously with the verbal portrait created for one of the sounds from the pair. Participants had to identify the sound which better corresponds to the given verbal portrait and to indicate the most significant characteristics serving the basis for the choice. This data was used to correct the verbal portraits and to reduce the number of characteristics they contained from 6 to 4. In the second series, the modified portraits were presented to participants having the same task to identify the sounds. In all the experiments, the independent measures design was used. The results showed a high percent of correct identifications of the sounds (more than 77%) on the basis of their verbal portraits. Reducing the amount of characteristics from 6 to 4 didn't decrease accuracy of identification.

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