Timbre description of the sound of air-treatment systems for predicting acoustic comfort

Antoine Minard (1) , Alexis Billon (2) , Bertrand Goujard , Benjamin Robin , Francette Fournier , Jean-Jacques Embrechts (2) , Anas Sakout

1 LEPTIAB - Laboratoire d'Étude des Phénomènes de Transfert et de l'Instantanéité : Agro-industrie et Bâtiment
2 Université de Liège

This study aims at defining reliable acoustic cues for the measure, characterization and prediction of the acoustic comfort of air-treatment systems (ATS). To meet customers' expectations, industrial products tend increasingly to follow a process of "sound design". In this process, the perceptual evaluation of sound quality is a necessary step to define acoustic specifications. In this context, this study aims at defining the main perceptual attributes of the sound of air-treatment systems in order to predict users’ preferences. The timbre space of a sound dataset extracted from a large recording database was thus identified through a similarity experiment where participants were asked to rate the resemblance between each pair of sounds. The results of this experiment were analyzed with a Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) method in order to extract the main perceptual attributes. Finally, these attributes were linked to relevant audio features through a regression method in order to define a reliable computable metric of acoustic comfort. This study was conducted through the Vaicteur Air² project supported by OSEO.

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Antoine Minard, Alexis Billon, Bertrand Goujard, Benjamin Robin, Francette Fournier, et al.. Timbre description of the sound of air-treatment systems for predicting acoustic comfort. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811272⟩