Nuevas métricas de evaluación de la calidad acústica de salas: la incorporación de los modelos perceptivos.

[EN] Qualitative analysis of systems has gained importance in recent years, by incorporating new approaching perspectives to assessment problems, which often include the user's point of view. Traditionally, in the field of acoustics and sound, qualitative evaluation of sound events has been a task entrusted to the classical psychoacoustic techniques. Statistical analysis of the results produced by these techniques has offered a standard response or reference to a particular problem. Moreover, also in the acoustic science, the study of systems by establishing physical models designed to describe the phenomenology that takes place in them, has been the source of a lot of metrics. Historically, these models and measurement techniques have been originated by the demands of specific industries and these procedures have been subsequently adapted to scopes of application sometimes very different from the original for which they were conceived. The magnitudes offered by these metrics, in addition to quantify a given variable of the model, are often related to qualitative aspects of the systems themselves. The establishment of a correlation between the results offered by these metrics and qualitative assessments made by psychoacoustics experimentation has not always been as satisfactory than could be expected, leading sometimes to a dichotomy between the objective and the subjective metrics, regarding phenomenological and qualitative description respectively. In the last decades, the knowledge generated through psychoacoustic experimentation has been used, along with the improvement of signal processing techniques, in order to model the human auditory system. Such work has led to the development of perceptual models. The main applicant of these qualitative assessment techniques was, firstly, the mobile phone industry and subsequently those related to audio-visual content broadcasting through new digital transmission channels. The need to reduce the transmission bit rate with the least possible qualitative degradation, first led to the development of compression codecs, based on perceptual aspects. These compression techniques are constantly evolving. But another consequence of this perceptive approach is the establishment of signal degradation and service monitoring measurement techniques also based on perceptual models. Thus, a change of perspective is produced: modelling of transmission channel is replaced by perceptual modelling, in order to establish an assessment that, in principle, could be more directly related to the most relevant aspects of the perception process, and consequently, to the system's qualitative assessment. We will see that historically, exchanges of techniques between different application areas has been a usual practice in the context of models and methods for quality assessing. With this, this study aims to assess the application of a perceptual model to a different scope of those initially foreseen for these models. Typically, perceptual models are applied to signals transmitted through a digital…