- Details
- Published: 09 January 2013
Sensory evaluation methods have been predominantly developed in food and wine industry to explore the perceptual characteristics of products, which are hard to evaluate through consumer based preference methods due to huge variation in individual tastes. The acoustics of concert halls is also heavily influenced by a matter of taste. Therefore, sensory evaluation methods are very useful for studying auditorium acoustics due to their ability to extract information often hidden behind preference judgements. With such methods the sensory profiles of concert halls or profiles of seats inside one concert hall can be formed.
Sensory evaluation can also be performed using consensus vocabulary profiling (CVP) where a group of assessors first elicit the adjectives to describe the stimuli and then with group discussions develop a common vocabulary of consensus attributes. CVP approach represents one of the most common tools in sensory science, but is very challenging to tailor to concert hall acoustics studies due to physical constraints. Such process would require the initial development of a consensus language based on visits to concert halls with live orchestras, followed by a second round of visits for attribute ratings. The process would thus be very laborious and would also require expert listeners. To be able to do such studies in the future we are first trying to understand the primary consensus attributes with IVP studies. Later, it might be reasonable to have an expert panel to develop the consensus language.
The IVP approach allows the assessor to employ their own attributes and thus overcomes the need for assessors to interpret the complex means of consensus attributes used in CVP. For example, the attribute clarity can have several definitions and it cannot be ensured that all assessors would understand and agree upon the meaning and usage of a such an attribute scale. The results of individual vocabulary development studies can give a lot of detailed information of the perception of acoustics, in addition to the method being relatively rapid to implement. The discriminating attributes elicited by the assessors provide valuable information as such, but the ordering of samples with these attributes in a common factorial space enables us to create sensory profiles of the studied concert halls.
The process of sensory evaluation with individually elicited attributes.
Usually, the process lasts 3-4 times 2h for each assessor.
Classification of measurement methods in the physical, sensory and affective domains, as presented by Lorho [1].
Research on sensory evaluation in Aalto
We have used sensory evaluation for concert hall acoustics studies. The main results are presented on separate pages, see more...
References
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@book{law99,
address = "New York, NY, USA",
author = "Lawless, H.T. and Heymann, H.",
date-added = "2013-02-04 13:25:59 +0200",
date-modified = "2013-02-04 13:25:59 +0200",
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year = 1999
}
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@phdthesis{lorho2010,
author = "G. Lorho",
date-added = "2013-02-04 13:23:54 +0200",
date-modified = "2013-02-04 13:23:54 +0200",
school = "Aalto University School of Science and Technology",
title = "Perceived Quality Evaluation: An Application to Sound Reproduction over Headphones",
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year = 2010,
bdsk-url-1 = "http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2010/isbn9789526031965/"
}
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@inproceedings{lok11ioa,
address = "Dublin, Ireland",
author = {T. Lokki and J. P{\"a}tynen and N. Zacharov},
booktitle = "The IOA 8th International Conference on Auditorium Acoustics",
date-added = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
date-modified = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
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year = 2011
}
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date-added = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
date-modified = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
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note = "Invited Keynote",
pages = "32-37",
title = "Recording and reproducing concert hall acoustics for subjective evaluation",
year = 2011
}
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@article{lok11jasa,
author = {T. Lokki and J. P{\"a}tynen and A. Kuusinen and H. Vertanen and S. Tervo},
date-added = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
date-modified = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
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number = 2,
pages = "835-849",
title = "Concert Hall Acoustics Assessment with Individually Elicited Attributes",
volume = 130,
year = 2011
}
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@article{lok11jasael,
author = {T. Lokki and J. P{\"a}tynen and S. Tervo and S. Siltanen and L. Savioja},
date-added = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
date-modified = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
journal = "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America",
month = "June",
number = 6,
pages = "EL223-EL228",
title = "Engaging concert hall acoustics is made up of temporal envelope preserving reflections",
volume = 129,
year = 2011
}
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@article{lok11jasael2,
author = {T. Lokki and J. P{\"a}tynen},
date-added = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
date-modified = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
journal = "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America",
number = 5,
pages = "EL345-EL351",
title = "Lateral reflections are favorable in concert halls due to binaural loudness",
volume = 130,
year = 2011
}
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@article{lok12jasa,
author = {T. Lokki and J. P{\"a}tynen and A. Kuusinen and S. Tervo},
date-added = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
date-modified = "2013-02-04 12:39:38 +0200",
journal = "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America",
month = "November",
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number = 5,
title = "Disentangling preference ratings of concert hall acoustics using subjective sensory profiles",
volume = 132,
year = 2012
}
