Analysis of Musical Spectral Distortions as a Rating Mechanism for High-Fidelity Earplugs

Anderson DA. Analysis of Musical Spectral Distortions as a Rating Mechanism for High-Fidelity Earplugs. In: AES Convention 155. Audio Engineering Society; 2023. Paper 10664. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22245

@inproceedings{Anderson2023_22245,
  author = {Anderson, David A.},
  title = {{Analysis of Musical Spectral Distortions as a Rating Mechanism for High-Fidelity Earplugs}},
  booktitle = {AES Convention 155},
  note = {Paper 10664},
  year = {2023},
  month = oct,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22245}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Analysis of Musical Spectral Distortions as a Rating Mechanism for High-Fidelity Earplugs
AU  - Anderson, David A.
T2  - AES Convention 155
M1  - Paper 10664
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/10/06
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22245
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - High-fidelity earplugs are generally assumed to preserve the musical characteristics of attenuated sound reaching the eardrums better than general-purpose earplugs by having flatter spectral attenuation (or insertion loss) characteristics. However, as all earplugs display non-flat insertion loss characteristics, quantifying and comparing spectral distortion magnitude is non-trivial: a simple calculation of flatness doesn’t capture information about the relevance to musical perception of the different types of spectral distortions. In this paper, a method is proposed that compares earplug spectral distortion by their effects on commonly used spectral measures of timbre on a collection of audio files: centroid, spread, skewness, kurtosis, flatness, and brightness. This musical spectral distortion score is shown to have very little correlation to a simple metric evaluating insertion loss flatness, and moderate correlation to simple average insertion loss in decibels, while also showing that the a foam earplug is more distorting than any of the musician earplugs.
ER  -