Methods for the assessment of pleasantness in sound quality

Recently, listener tests of certain products have shown that the sense of pleasantness is significant in sound quality evaluation. For instance, pleasantness was an attribute frequently selected by subjects in the free word description of vacuum cleaner sounds. However, the relationship between the sense of pleasantness and psychoacoustic metrics is specific for each product. Present predicting models of pleasantness are not always suitable and have certain limitations, hence a new model of pleasantness was developed in our research. The development was based on the evaluation of specific products (vacuum cleaners and computer fans). The new model was then applied in two cases: first, for the evaluation of vacuum cleaners, which strongly correlated with the psychoacoustic metrics. Equally, the new model can be applied to a product for which the correlation coefficients between the standard psychoacoustic metrics and pleasantness were not significant (in this paper, the evaluation of computer fans).