identification test procedure ("James W. Beauchamp" )


Subject: identification test procedure
From:    "James W. Beauchamp"  <jwb(at)TIMBRE.MUSIC.UIUC.EDU>
Date:    Fri, 9 Oct 1998 10:43:48 -0500

Folks, A colleague of mine is using a particular procedure to test how well synthetic piano tones resemble "original" piano tones. The "original" tones are actually analyzed and resynthesized using a phase vocoder method (in order to eliminate background noise) and the synthetic tones are resynthesized with a fair amount of data reduction. Pitches between E1 and D7 of equal numbers of original and synthetic tones are presented in random order to the listener, and the listener's task is to choose which tones are synthetic. My colleague's contention is that if the listener were to simply guess, the score would be 50%, and that any score less than 50% indicates poor ability to distinguish, thus proving the efficacy of the data reduction method. Indeed, the scores ranged from 15% to 45%. My question is -- Does this really work? If the listener tries to maximize his/her score, then he/she might tend to guess, moving the score towards 50%. On the other hand, if the subject is truly honest and he/she cannot distinguish, he/she would choose no tones and would score 0%. I guess it would depend on how the subjects are instructed to make their decisions, but then can you trust them to always follow instructions? Shouldn't the false positives also be reported? Is there a way to properly evaluate the results of this test? What is the best paradigm to test the efficacy of a data reduction method? Jim Beauchamp University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign j-beauch(at)uiuc.edu McGill is running a new version of LISTSERV (1.8d on Windows NT). Information is available on the WEB at http://www.mcgill.ca/cc/listserv


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