The analysis of available literature indicates that tests of products sound quality, which would not involve participation of groups of listeners supposed to evaluate the sounds emitted by these products, are neither carried out in Poland, nor in the world. That results in the fact that the products sound quality is determined on the basis of psychoacoustic information and comprises both objective and subjective factors of sound perception. With reference to those factors and to different life cycles of the machine, an original definition of the “sound quality of the machine” has been developed and presented in this article. The global index of the acoustic quality of the machine, accounting for the relations between the noise level at the workstation and the selected parameters characterising both the machine's sound activity and the working environment, was adopted as the measure of the sound quality of the machine. The experiments that followed confirmed the appropriateness of the assessment made with the use of the global index of acoustic quality.

The paper shows a study on the relationship between noise measures and sound quality (SQ) features that

are related to annoyance caused by the traffic noise. First, a methodology to perform analyses related to

the traffic noise annoyance is described including references to parameters of the assessment of road noise

sources. Next, the measurement setup, location and results are presented along with the derived sound quality

features. Then, statistical analyses are performed to compare the measurement results and sound quality

features. The included conclusions are focused on showing that the obtained loudness values, regardless of

the used system, are similar in a statistical sense. Contrarily, sharpness, roughness and fluctuation strength

values differ for the tools employed.

The work presents a comparison of some sound attributes perceived at a multichannel and stereo playback of musical recordings. The width of the virtual source, coherence impression, total size of sound scene, general quality and balance were the subjects of interest after the format reduction in accordance with the ITU recommendation. The results showed that evaluation of these attributes depends on the way the original audiosphere has been created in the surround system, for example, for a narrow virtual source the mix-down process causes only a small change in its size but for a broad source the observed degradation is significant. In addition, different ways of conversion from the multichannel to stereo format have been tested for compatibility.

Two violins were investigated. The only intentionally introduced difference between them was the type of varnish. One of the instruments was covered with a spirit varnish, the other was oil varnished. Experimental modal analysis was done for unvarnished/varnished violins and a questionnaire inquiry on the instrument’s sound quality was performed. The aim of both examinations was to find differences and similarities between the two instruments in the objective (modal parameters) and subjective domain (subjective evaluation of sound quality). In the modal analysis, three strongly radiating signature modes were taken into account. Varnishing did not change the sequence of mode shapes. Modal frequencies A0 and B(1+) were not changed by oil varnishing compared to the unvarnished condition. For the oil varnished instrument, the frequency of mode B(1+) was lower than that of the same mode of the spirit varnished instrument. Our two violins were not excellent instruments, but before varnishing they were practically identical. However, after varnishing it appeared that the oil-varnished violin was better than the spirit-varnished instrument. Therefore, it can be assumed with a fairly high probability that also in general, the oil-varnished violins sound somewhat better than initially identical spirit-varnished ones.

During operation, construction machines generate high noise levels which can adversely affect the health and the job performance of operators. The noise control techniques currently applied to reduce the noise transmitted into the operator cab are all based on the decrease of the sound pressure level. Merely reducing this noise parameter may be suitable for the compliance with the legislative requirements but, unfortunately, it is not sufficient to improve the subjective human response to noise. The absolute necessity to guarantee comfortable and safe conditions for workers, requires a change of perspective and the identification of different noise control criteria able to combine the reduction of noise levels with that of psychophysical descriptors representing those noise attributes related to the subjective acoustical discomfort. This paper presents the results of a study concerning the “customization” of a methodology based on Sound Quality for the noise control of construction machines. The purpose is to define new hearing-related criteria for the noise control able to guarantee not only reduced noise levels at the operator position but also a reduced annoyance perception.

The study makes an attempt to model a complete vibrating guitar including its non-linear features, specifically the tension-compression of truss rod and tension of strings. The purpose of such a model is to examine the influence of design parameters on tone. Most experimental studies are flawed by uncertainties introduced by materials and assembly of an instrument. Since numerical modelling of instruments allows for deterministic control over design parameters, a detailed numerical model of folk guitar was analysed and an experimental study was performed in order to simulate the excitation and measurement of guitar vibration. The virtual guitar was set up like a real guitar in a series of geometrically non-linear analyses. Balancing of strings and truss rod tension resulted in a realistic initial state of deformation, which affected the subsequent spectral analyses carried out after dynamic simulations. Design parameters of the guitar were freely manipulated without introducing unwanted uncertainties typical for experimental studies. The study highlights the importance of acoustic medium in numerical models.

The purpose of this study was to develop a sound quality model for real time active sound quality control systems. The model is based on an optimal analytic wavelet transform (OAWT) used along with a back propagation neural network (BPNN) in which the initial weights and thresholds are determined by particle swarm optimisation (PSO). In the model the input signal is decomposed into 24 critical bands to extract a feature matrix, based on energy, mean, and standard deviation indices of the sub signal scalogram obtained by OAWT. The feature matrix is fed into the neural network input to determine the psychoacoustic parameters used for sound quality evaluation. The results of the study show that the present model is in good agreement with psychoacoustic models of sound quality metrics and enables evaluation of the quality of sound at a lower computational cost than the existing models.

In this paper, a modified sound quality evaluation (SQE) model is developed based on combination of an optimized artificial neural network (ANN) and the wavelet packet transform (WPT). The presented SQE model is a signal processing technique, which can be implemented in current microphones for predicting the sound quality. The proposed method extracts objective psychoacoustic metrics including loudness, sharpness, roughness, and tonality from sound samples, by using a special selection of multi-level nodes of the WPT combined with a trained ANN. The model is optimized using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the back propagation (BP) algorithms. The obtained results reveal that the proposed model shows the lowest mean square error and the highest correlation with human perception while it has the lowest computational cost compared to those of the other models and software.