The role of human influence factors on overall listening experience

Tim Walton,Michael Evans

doi:10.1007/s41233-017-0015-4

Abstract

Overall listening experience (OLE) is an evaluation measure specific to the evaluation of audio, which aims to include all possible factors that may influence listeners’ ratings of stimuli. As with quality of experience in general, OLE ratings are user dependent. Previous research has shown that listeners can be categorised by how much their OLE is influenced by content and technical audio quality respectively. In this article, we expand on this knowledge by investigating correlations between a range of human influence factors and the degree to which a listener is influenced by content and technical audio quality. This was done by means of a web-based experiment involving 58 participants from a range of backgrounds. Results show that listener type is significantly correlated with a range of psychographic variables and that the attitudinal measure ‘competence’ is the most suitable variable to be used as a predictor of listener type. As well as these results having direct applications such as tailoring systems and services to the needs of specific user groups, the results presented add to the understanding of how human factors can influence quality of experience in general.

Highlights

Subjective evaluation is a fundamental process in the advancement of multimedia services and systems, not least in the context of audio technology
Two participants were seen to have a BIR mean difference outside of 1.5 × the interquartile range, as these two outliers were close to the boundary of 1.5 × IQR, it was decided that it was not necessary to exclude these participants from further analysis
An alternative approach to excluding participants would be to individually select the items presented to each participant as in previous overall listening experience (OLE) experiments [27], this requires a larger pool of items to be rated than

Summary

Introduction

Subjective evaluation is a fundamental process in the advancement of multimedia services and systems, not least in the context of audio technology. In order to evaluate such technology in an ecologically valid manner, it is necessary to consider factors such as the type of content to be consumed with the technology, where the technology will be used and who will be using the technology. These considerations are central to the notion of quality of experience (QoE) and it can be beneficial to take a quality of experience approach when evaluating audio technology. One evaluation measure that has been introduced with the aim of evaluating audio technology with a QoE mindset is overall listening experience (OLE) [1]. This was highlighted in a study which showed that the relative influence of content and technical quality on OLE is very listener dependent; on the one hand some users are heavily influenced by content when making OLE judgements and, on the other hand, some users are heavily influenced by technical audio quality when making OLE judgements, with a continuum of users between [2]

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