The role of human influence factors on overall listening experience

Overall listening experience (OLE) is an evaluation measure specific to the evaluation of audio, which aims to include all possible factors that may influence listeners’ ratings of stimuli. As with quality of experience in general, OLE ratings are user dependent. Previous research has shown that listeners can be categorised by how much their OLE is influenced by content and technical audio quality respectively. In this article, we expand on this knowledge by investigating correlations between a range of human influence factors and the degree to which a listener is influenced by content and technical audio quality. This was done by means of a web-based experiment involving 58 participants from a range of backgrounds. Results show that listener type is significantly correlated with a range of psychographic variables and that the attitudinal measure ‘competence’ is the most suitable variable to be used as a predictor of listener type. As well as these results having direct applications such as tailoring systems and services to the needs of specific user groups, the results presented add to the understanding of how human factors can influence quality of experience in general.