Perception of Audio Quality in Productions of Popular Music

The quality of recorded music is often highly disputed. To gain insight into the dimensions of quality perception, subjective and objective evaluation of musical programme material, extracted from commercial CDs, was undertaken. It was observed that perception of audio quality and liking of the music can be affected by separate factors. Familiarity with stimuli affected like ratings while quality ratings were most associated with signal features related to perceived loudness and dynamic range compression. The effect of listener expertise was small. Additionally, the sonic attributes describing quality ratings were gathered and indicate a diverse lexicon relating to timbre, space, defects and other concepts. The results also suggest that, while the perceived quality of popular music may have decreased over recent years, like ratings were unaffected.