Perceptual Evaluation of Synthesized Sound Effects

Abstract

Sound synthesis is the process of generating artificial sounds through some form of simulation or modelling. This article aims to identify which sound synthesis methods achieve the goal of producing a believable audio sample that may replace a recorded sound sample. A perceptual evaluation experiment of five different sound synthesis techniques was undertaken. Additive synthesis, statistical modelling synthesis with two different feature sets, physically inspired synthesis, concatenative synthesis, and sinusoidal modelling synthesis were all compared. Evaluation using eight different sound class stimuli and 66 different samples was undertaken. The additive synthesizer is the only synthesis method not considered significantly different from the reference sample across all sounds classes. The results demonstrate that sound synthesis can be considered as realistic as a recorded sample and makes recommendations for use of synthesis methods, given different sound class contexts.