When designing sound evaluation experiments, researchers rely on listening test methods, such as rating scales (RS). This work aims to investigate the suitability of best-worst scaling (BWS) for the perceptual evaluation of sound qualities. To do so, 20 participants rated the “brightness” of a corpus of instrumental sounds (N = 100) with RS and BWS methods. The results show that BWS procedure is the fastest and that RS and BWS are equivalent in terms of performance. Interestingly, participants preferred BWS over RS. Therefore, BWS is an alternative method that reliably measures perceptual sound qualities and could be used in many-sounds paradigm.

When designing sound evaluation experiments, researchers rely on listening test methods, such as rating scales (RS). In this work, we investigated the suitability of best-worst scaling (BWS) — a relative judgment method — for the perceptual evaluation of sound qualities. To do so, 20 participants rated the ‘brightness’ of a corpus of instrumental sounds (N=100) with RS and BWS methods. Our results show that BWS is equivalent to RS in terms of performance, participants’ impression, and duration. Interestingly, participants preferred the BWS over RS. Therefore, BWS is an alternative that reliably measure perceptual sound qualities and could be used in many-sounds paradigm.