What is a "Sound Wheel"?

Sound Wheel

A sound wheel is a hierarchical visual representation of a perceptual attribute lexicon. Attributes with similarities are organized in the same category and grouped near each other on a doughnut graph. The result is a visual representation of how attributes are related. The wheel can be used to explain and understand descriptive sensory analysis and may be applied to listening panel training.  

In general, the assessors must be trained to have the same understanding of the descriptors. When differences become very subtle, training is highly necessary.  

References on sensory evaluation, including the Sound Wheel.  

[1] Stone, H., and Sidel, J.L., Sensory evaluation practices, 2nd ed., Academic Press, San Diego, CA, USA, 1993  

[2] Lawless, H. & Heymann, H., Sensory evaluation of food – Principles and Practices, Springer, 2010  

[3] Bech, S. & Zacharov, N., Perceptual Audio Evaluation, Wiley, ISBN 0-470-86923-2, 2006  

[4] Pedersen, T. H. & Zacharov, N., How many psycho-acoustic attributes are needed? Acoustics08 proceedings, 2008  

[5] Pedersen, T. H., The semantic space of sound, technical report, DELTA, ISBN 978-87-7716-036-3, 2008  

[6] ASTM International, DS72, Lexicon for Sensory Evaluation: Aroma, Flavor, Texture and Appearance, ISBN-13: 978-0-8031-7025-4, 2011  

[7] Pedersen, T. H. & Zacharov, N., The Development of a Sound Wheel for Reproduced Sound. AES 138, Warsaw Poland  

[8] Zentner, M., Grandjean, D., & Scherer, K. Emotions evoked by the sound of music: Characterization, classification, and measurement. Emotion, 8, 494-521, 2008  

[9] H. Wilkens, Mehrdimensionale Beschreibung subjektiver Beurteilungen der Akustik von Konzertsälen, Ph.D. thesis, TU Berlin, 1975.  

[10] A. Gabrielsson and H. Sjögren, "Perceived sound quality of sound-reproduction systems," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 65, no. 4, pp. 1019–1033, 1979.  

[11] A. Gabrielsson, "Dimension analyses of perceived quality of sound reproduction systems," Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 20, pp. 159–169, 1979.  

[12] Floyd E. Toole, "Subjective measurements of loudspeaker sound quality and listener performance," J. Audio Eng. Soc, vol. 33, no. 1/2, pp. 2–32, 1985.  

[13] C Lavandier, Validation perceptive d’un modèle objectif de caractérisation de la qualité acoustique des salles, Ph.D. thesis, Université du Maine, Le Mans, France, June 1989.  

[14] Tomasz Letowski, "Sound quality assessment: Concepts and criteria," in Audio Engineering Society Convention 87, Oct 1989.  

[15] G. Kahle, Validation d’un modèle objectif de la perception de la qualité acoustique dans un ensemble de salles de concerts et d’opéras, Ph.D. thesis, IRCAM, Paris, France, June 1995.  

[16] Russell Mason and Francis Rumsey, "An assessment of the spatial performance of virtual home theatre algorithms by subjective and objective methods," in Audio Engineering Society 108th Convention, Feb 2000.  

[17] N. Zacharov and K. Koivuniemi, "Unravelling the perception of spatial sound reproduction: Language development, verbal protocol analysis, and listener training," in Audio Engineering Society Convention 111, Nov 2001.  

[18] N. Zacharov and K. Koivuniemi, "Perceptual audio profiling and mapping of spatial sound displays," in Proceedings of the Int. Conf. on Auditory Display. ICAD, 2001, pp. 95–104.  

[19] Francis Rumsey, "Spatial quality evaluation for reproduced sound: Terminology, meaning, and a scene-based paradigm," J. Audio Eng. Soc, vol. 50, no. 9, pp. 651–666, 2002.  

[20] Jan Berg and Francis Rumsey, "Systematic evaluation of perceived spatial quality," in Audio Engineering Society Conference: 24th International Conference: Multichannel Audio, The New Reality, Jun 2003.  

[21] C. Guastavino and B. F. G. Katz, "Perceptual evaluation of multi-dimensional spatial audio reproduction," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 116, no. 2, pp. 1105–1115, 2004.  

[22] Gaëtan Lorho, "Individual vocabulary profiling of spatial enhancement systems for stereo headphone reproduction," in Audio Engineering Society Convention 119, Oct. 2005.  

[23] Jan Berg and Francis Rumsey, "Identification of quality attributes of spatial audio by repertory grid technique," J. Audio Eng. Soc, vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 365–379, 2006.  

[24] Sylvain Choisel and Florian Wickelmaier, "Extraction of auditory features and elicitation of attributes for the assessment of multichannel reproduced sound," J. Audio Eng. Soc, vol. 54, no. 9, pp. 815–826, 2006.  

[25] Robert Sazdov, Garth Paine, and Kate Stevens, "Perceptual investigation into envelopment, spatial clarity, and engulfment in reproduced multichannel audio," in Audio Engineering Society Conference: 31st International Conference: New Directions in High-Resolution Audio, Jun 2007.  

[26] Andreas Silzle, "Quality taxonomies for auditory virtual environments," in Audio Engineering Society Convention 122, May 2007.  

[27] Helmut Wittek, Perceptual differences between wavefield synthesis and stereophony, Ph.D. thesis, University of Surrey, 2007.  

[28] Tapio Lokki, Jukka Pätynen, Antti Kuusinen, and Sakari Tervo, "Disentangling preference ratings of concert hall acoustics using subjective sensory profiles," The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 132, no. 5, pp. 3148 – 3161, 2012.  

[29] Sarah Le Bagousse, Mathieu Paquier, and Catherine Colomes, "Categorization of sound attributes for audio quality assessment a lexical study," J. Audio Eng. Soc, vol. 62, no. 11, pp. 736–747, 2014.  

[30] Alexander Lindau, Vera Erbes, Steffen Lepa, Hans-Joachim Maempel, Fabian Brinkmann, and Stefan Weinzierl, "A spatial audio quality inventory for virtual acoustic environments (SAQI)," in Proc. of the EAA Joint Symposium on Auralization and Ambisonics, 2014.  

[31] Neofytos Kaplanis, Søren Bech, Søren Holdt Jensen, and Toon van Waterschoot, "Perception of reverberation in small rooms: A literature study," in Audio Engineering Society Conference: 55th International Conference: Spatial Audio, Aug 2014.