Investigating “the experience effect” in audio quality assessment

The study reported in this paper aims to investigate the integration of the experience effect in audio quality assessment methods. During our subjective tests, we have noticed that a low quality audio signal affect strongly and negatively the listeners´ opinion on the next-coming test sequences, even if they are of higher quality. This leads eventually to erroneous data and consequently to a misevaluation of audio codecs and systems. This phenomenon called here, the “experience effect”, is presented and analyzed through an enriched experimental framework, with suggestions for statistical approaches to smooth out raw data and get more reliable results. This paper is a snapshot of our ongoing work on the development of new quality assessment methodologies, combining both the perceptual and behavioral aspects of human response.