Music 422/ EE 367C Winter 2006/2007

Assignment #7
Due March 2, 2007

Listening Test:
In this exercise you will perform a listening test to compare the coders you built in the
previous assignments on a variety of test samples. You will rate the coders using the ITU-R
5-point impairment scale.
a) Prepare a set of short test signals to be used for your listening test. Make sure that the set
includes 1) human speech, 2) highly tonal music (e.g., flute, harpsichord, etc.), and 3) music
with sharp attacks (e.g., drum solo, castanet, etc.).
b) Encode/decode each of your test signals using
1) your coder from Assignment #2 with 4-bit midtread uniform quantization,
2) your coder from Assignment #2 with 3 scale bits and 5 mantissa bit midtread floating
point quantization,
3) your coder from Assignment #3 with N = 1024 and 4-bit midtread uniform quantization,
4) your coder from Assignment #3 with N = 1024 and 3 scale bit – 5 mantissa bit floating
point quantization, and
5) your coder from Assignment #5 at a data rate of 128-256 kb/s.
c) Grade each of your encoded/decoded test signals using the ITU-R 5-grade impairment scale.
Summarize the performance of your coders.
d) Team with a classmate to perform a double-blind, triple-stimulus with hidden reference
listening test using several of your friends and classmates as test subjects to evaluate your
encoded/decoded test signals. For each coder, prepare a graphical summary of the results
showing the highest/lowest/mean SDG score for each sound test signal. Summarize the
results. Do your classmates (who are hopefully trained listeners at this point) give
significantly different ratings than your other friends?