Dynamic Analysis of Psychoacoustic Parameters to Evaluate Sound Quality of an Indian String Instrument Sitar

Abstract

In this study, the psychoacoustic parameters, loudness, and sharpness are studied to establish their correlation to the sound quality of an Indian string instrument Sitar. These parameters are extracted using audio feature extraction in the Simcenter Testlab software. The sound recording is carried in an anechoic chamber to reduce or eliminate the noise in the recorded audio signal. The musical sound quality evaluation has a lot of challenges as it involves subjective human evaluation. Besides, quantifying the evaluation parameters must account for the nonlinear perception of sound in the frequency as well as time domain. The psychoacoustic parameters become important for such evaluation. Three different Sitars are used in this study. The quality of these Sitars are predecided using opinions given by expert juries of ten Sitarists and is reported here as ‘Khuli Jawari’, ‘Gol Jawari’, and ‘Band Jawari’ Sitars. The relative values of the chosen psychoacoustic parameters correlate with the subjective evaluation of the sound quality of the Sitar as established by the team of juries. Thus, these parameters quantify the subjective evaluation of the musical sound quality of Sitar.KeywordsPsychoacousticsAudio feature extractionLoudnessSharpnessSitar