Individual Differences in Speech-Quality Perception
Victor E. McGee · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1968
Consider one voice, bandlimited in K different ways. A complete paired-comparison schedule is presented to N listeners to obtain “similarity-with-respect-to-quality” judgments. From each listener's judgments, a “perceptual space” is determined and the question is: “Are there individual differences between these N perceptual spaces?” In order to answer this, we compare perceptual spaces, obtain some index of similarity, and determine a “points-of-view” space containing N points. Suppose this is a two-space. Typically we now argue for differences on the basis of how the N points spread out on a sheet of graph paper, but a very real question is rarely considered. How big can the points-of-view space be? By introducing “random listeners” (random perceptual spaces), we can answer this question; and the results so far indicate that “real listeners” cluster so tightly in this “real-plus-random” space that no individual differences can be found for the “real listeners.” [This research was supported by the Office of Naval Research.]