Development of a feedback interface for in-situ soundscape evaluation

Studies involving subjective evaluation require feedback from human participants to assess the performance of a system or an environment. A participant is typically presented with a set of metrics to be observed and they present their assessment accordingly. Investigator-led in-situ soundscape evaluation in ISO 12913-2 collects perceptual responses along with other acoustical and locale information. This is a labor intensive and time-consuming processes. To alleviate and complement investigator-led evaluations, a portable and compact feedback system with an e-ink display and capacitive buttons was designed, and is undergoing field tests to address the aforementioned requirements. The system employs a low-cost, low-power microcontroller unit (MCU) with necessary hardware interfaces to enable capacitive sensing. Capacitive buttons provide an intuitive interface and avoid the inherent wear and tear of mechanical buttons. This digitized feedback interface affords the flexibility to synchronize (wired or wirelessly) with a playback system to evaluate an augmented soundscape, and is suitable for both supervised and unsupervised subjective assessments.