Content area
Abstract
This research presents the results of a study conducted to evaluate the perceived quality of domestic appliances based on their door closure sounds. The main aim of this study was to develop an objective evaluation scheme for the prediction of perceived domestic appliance quality based on objective acoustic and psychoacoustic features of the appliance’s door closure sound. The motivation for this work was that, in a showroom situation, the only features available for the customer to judge a domestic appliance upon are its visual aesthetics and the sound produced by passive components such as door closure and switch sounds; it is therefore vital that the door closure sound of a domestic appliance suggests a high quality product. In this study, the perception of domestic appliance door closure sounds has been approached as a multidimensional problem. Through paired comparison testing and multidimensional scaling analysis, four salient dimensions relating to the perception of domestic appliance door closure sounds were revealed; these dimensions were found to relate to decay time (s), rise time (s), the logarithm of the one-third octave band with maximum energy (Hz), and sharpness at peak loudness (acum). By relating the four perceptual dimensions to judged appliance quality via linear regression, a model for the prediction of perceived appliance quality was determined. This model was validated using a separate set of door closure sounds and was found to predict perceived domestic appliance quality to a high accuracy. In addition to paired comparison testing, perceived appliance quality was also judged on a five point semantic scale; using logistic regression techniques, the linear perceived appliance quality model was related to a meaningful categorical scale.