Thanks for sharing the references!
In my view, MUSHRA cannot be recommended for studying musical similarity.
The method is designed to identify differences between stimuli on a defined dimension (which is audio quality in the MUSHRA recommendation, although this rating method could also be used for evaluating other perceptual dimensions).
In the MUSHRA method, listeners are NOT asked to rate the similarity of the stimuli, however. While in principle information about similarity could be deduced in an indirect manner from the ratings obtained with MUSHRA (similar mean ratings = high similarity), this would require that you can specify the perceptual dimension on which your stimuli differ or are similar (say, rhythm, tempo, consonance/dissonance, mood etc.).
If that is not possible, the other approaches that were suggested like triadic tests or MDS can be used *without* having to specify which exact dimension the similarity judgments should refer to, and to identify structures in the (dis-) similarity ratings.
In addition, I could imagine that the MUSHRA concepts of a high-quality “reference” and a low-quality “anchor” do not easily apply to the experiments you have in mind.
Best
Daniel
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--- Dr. Daniel Oberfeld-Twistel
Associate Professor
Johannes Gutenberg - Universitaet Mainz
Institute of Psychology
Experimental Psychology
Phone ++49 (0) 6131 39 39274
From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Pat Savage
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 6:19 AM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Measuring perceptual similarity
Dear list,
Thanks very much for all of your responses. I’m summarizing below all the reference recommendations I received.
I still want to more fully read some of these, but so far my impression is that the Giordano et al. (2011) paper gives a good review of the benefits and drawbacks of previous methods, but since that was published MUSHRA seems to have become the standard method for these types of subjective perceptual similarity ratings.
Please let me know if I seem to be misunderstanding anything here.
Cheers,
Pat
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Flexer, A., & Grill, T. (2016). The Problem of Limited Inter-rater Agreement in Modelling Music Similarity. Journal of New Music Research, 45(3), 1–13.
P. Susini, S. McAdams, S. Winsberg: A multidimensional technique for sound quality assessment. Acta Acustica united with Acustica 85 (1999), 650–656.
Novello, A., McKinney, M. F., & Kohlrausch, A. (2006). Perceptual evaluation of music similarity. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval. Retrieved from http://ismir2006.ismir.
net/PAPERS/ISMIR06148_Paper. Michaud, P. Y., Meunier, S., Herzog, P., Lavandier, M., & D’Aubigny, G. D. (2013). Perceptual evaluation of dissimilarity between auditory stimuli: An alternative to the paired comparison. Acta Acustica United with Acustica, 99(5), 806–815.
Wolff, D., & Weyde, T. (2011). Adapting Metrics for Music Similarity Using Comparative Ratings. 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR’11), Proc., (Ismir), 73–78.
B. L. Giordano, C. Guastavino, E. Murphy, M. Ogg, B. K. Smith, S. McAdams: Comparison of methods for collecting and modeling dissimilarity data: Applications to complex sound stimuli. Multivariate Behavioral Research 46 (2011), 779–811.
P. Y. Michaud, S. Meunier, P. Herzog, M. Lavandier, G. d’Aubigny: Perceptual evaluation of dissimilarity between auditory stimuli: an alternative to the paired comparison. Acta Acustica united with Acustica 99 (2013), 806–815.
Collett, E., Marx, M., Gaillard, P., Roby, B., Fraysse, B., & Deguine, O. (2016). Categorization of common sounds by cochlear implanted and normal hearing adults. Hearing Research, 335, 207–219.
International Telecommunication Union. (2015). ITU-R BS.1534-3, Method for the subjective assessment of intermediate quality level of audio systems. ITU-R Recommendation, 1534–3, 1534–3. Retrieved from https://www.itu.int/dms_
pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS. 1534-3-201510-I!!PDF-E.pdf
Lavandier, M., Meunier, S., & Herzog, P. (2008). Identification of some perceptual dimensions underlying loudspeaker dissimilarities. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123(6), 4186–4198.
DZHAFAROV, E. N., & OLDENBURG, H. C. (2006). RECONSTRUCTING DISTANCES AMONG OBJECTS FROM THEIR DISCRIMINABILITY. Psychometrik
a , 71(2), 365–386.
Software:
Various:
MUSHRA:
Free-sorting:
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Dr. Patrick Savage
Project Associate ProfessorFaculty of Environment and Information Studies
Keio University SFC (Shonan Fujisawa Campus)
http://PatrickESavage.com