Behavioral Patterns Associated with Institution-Defined Listener Groups in Immersive Audio Evaluation

Sato R, Kim S. Behavioral Patterns Associated with Institution-Defined Listener Groups in Immersive Audio Evaluation. In: AES Show 2026 Nashville. Audio Engineering Society; 2026.pp. 41:1-10. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23472

@inproceedings{Sato2026_23472,
  author = {Sato, Rai and Kim, Sungyoung},
  title = {{Behavioral Patterns Associated with Institution-Defined Listener Groups in Immersive Audio Evaluation}},
  booktitle = {AES Show 2026 Nashville},
  pages = {41:1-10},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23472},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  address = {Gaylord Opryland Resort}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Behavioral Patterns Associated with Institution-Defined Listener Groups in Immersive Audio Evaluation
AU  - Sato, Rai
AU  - Kim, Sungyoung
T2  - AES Show 2026 Nashville
SP  - 1
EP  - 10
M1  - Paper 41
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/30
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23472
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
CY  - Gaylord Opryland Resort
LA  - en
AB  - Subjective evaluations of immersive audio often distinguish Experienced and Naive listener groups, but these labels are typically assigned from educational or institutional background, not from expertise verified through individual testing. This study examined how such institution-defined groups differed in their evaluations of music across listening rooms and reproduction formats. We analyzed an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising ratings from 139 listeners at six institutions. The listeners rated overall preference and five perceptual attributes: apparent source width, listener envelopment, depth, timbral quality, and clarity. The stimuli were binaural captures of two orchestral excerpts reproduced using two-channel stereo or 22.2-channel reproduction in three listening rooms and an anechoic reference. Listeners recruited from institutions labeled Experienced showed a larger timbral-quality contrast between the anechoic reference and one of the physical rooms, a larger preference contrast between these environments, and larger preference and apparent-source-width contrasts between the two reproduction formats. Beyond these effects, no additional statistically significant group differences were detected in responses to room or reproduction format. The preference-mapping analysis also detected no statistically significant group differences in the associations between the five perceptual attributes and overall preference. The results indicate that the institution-defined labels in this dataset were associated with a selective pattern of rating behavior rather than a uniform difference across attributes and experimental factors. These findings suggest that institutional recruitment background alone is insufficient to characterize an individual listeners evaluation performance. When listener labels are used to infer individual expertise, background information should be supplemented by task-specific screening and performance measures.
ER  -