C4DM Seminar: Brecht De Man - Listening Test Interface Design

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Date and Time
Tuesday, 12th July 2016, at 4:00pm

Place
Room ENG 324, Electronic Engineering building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS. Information on how to access the school can be found at here.

Speaker
Brecht De Man

Title
Listening Test Interface Design

Video
SlideShare Link

Abstract
Perceptual evaluation of audio is a key component in a wide range of research topics, from headphone design over codec quality to emotion in music, and beyond. The design of subjective experiments is a critical task, where adjustment of the parameters has a profound impact on the time and effort spent by the subjects and experimenter, and on the accuracy and reproducibility of the results - or whether there are any results at all.

The new Web Audio Evaluation Tool allows quick and easy setup of nearly any type of listening test, online or locally, without requiring any programming knowledge. Using this tool, important design principles are illustrated to prepare you to run your own successful listening tests, be it for your first study as an MSc student, or to improve your process as an experienced researcher.

This lecture includes content from a workshop on the same topic at the 140th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, chaired by Brecht and with Sean Olive (Harman) and Jan Berg (Luleå University of Technology) as panel members. It is relevant to both the uninitiated, as basic perceptual evaluation principles are discussed, and to experts in the field, covering several advanced and sometimes controversial design conundrums.

Those who cannot make it are invited to this similar lecture in Cambridge, on Wednesday 13 July at 6PM.

Bio
Brecht De Man is a researcher, sound engineer and musician. He is currently a PhD student in Audio Engineering at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. He has published and presented research on intelligent audio production tools and the psychoacoustics of recording engineering. Prior to this, he received a BSc and MSc in Electronic Engineering from the University of Ghent (Universiteit Gent) in Belgium, during which he also studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (Eidgenössische Technologische Hochschule Zürich) in Switzerland for one year at MSc level.