A psychoacoustic model with Partial Spectral Flatness Measure for tonality estimation

Abstract

Psychoacoustic studies show that the strength of masking is, among others, dependent on the tonality of the masker: the effect of noise maskers is stronger than that of tone maskers. Recently, a Partial Spectral Flatness Measure (PSFM) was introduced for tonality estimation in a psychoacoustic model for perceptual audio coding. The model consists of an Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filterbank which considers the spreading effect of individual local maskers in simultaneous masking. An optimized (with respect to audio quality and computational efficiency) PSFM is now compared to a similar psychoacoustic model with prediction based tonality estimation in medium (48 kbit/s) and low (32 kbit/s) bit rate conditions (mono) via subjective quality tests. 15 expert listeners participated in the subjective tests. The results are depicted and discussed. Additionally, we conducted the subjective tests with 15 non-expert consumers whose results are also shown and compared to those of the experts.