Comparative study of the commercial software for sound quality analysis

Sound quality (SQ) is a perceptual or subjective reaction to a sound and its concept becomes one of the important factors that improve the competitive power of a product. Through the various studies related to SQ by psycho-acoustic researchers, models for objective measures that substitute subjective evaluation, called SQ metrics, have been proposed which consider human auditory characteristics. Representative SQ metrics are loudness, sharpness, roughness, and fluctuation strength. For other SQ metrics except loudness, however, the calculation algorithms have not been standardized yet. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is difference among the commercial software for the calculation of SQ metrics and if any, how much difference exists among them. For this, three kinds of popular commercial software and one self-coded program were chosen and by applying them to some sample sounds, four representative SQ metrics were calculated and compared. As a result, it was confirmed that there are considerable differences among the calculated results of SQ metrics including loudness. This means that it is necessary to standardize SQ metrics as soon as possible before everything else and in addition, to mention used SQ software when an index that can predict SQ is developed or SQ database for any kind of product is created.