Development of a clarity parameter using a time-varying loudness model

Abstract

The perceived sound clarity is often estimated with the clarity index, which is calculated on the basis of physical acoustic measures that can correlate weakly to the way humans perceive sound for certain test conditions. Therefore, this study proposes a clarity parameter based on a binaural room impulse response processed with a time-varying loudness model. The proposed parameter is validated by calculating the correlation coefficient with subject responses collected from previous listening experiments. Results show that the parameter outperforms the clarity index in most of the tested conditions, but its performance is less robust than parameter for clarity (P).

A non intrusive audio clarity index (NIAC) and its application to blind source separation

“…Less work is dedicated to music clarity, which assessment often relies on room acoustic parameters [10], especially the clarity index C 80 , defined as the ratio between the energy within the first 80ms and the energy of the rest of the room impulse response (RIR). Recent works replace the sound pressure energies involved in this ratio by perceptually relevant quantities: nerve firing [11] or perceived loudness [12]. A content-specific measure was proposed in [1], based on the perceived loudnesses of direct and reverberated components of a given signal.…”