Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments
By K. Woods, Max H. Siegel, James Traer, Josh H. McDermott. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2017
415 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Psychophysical experiments conducted remotely over the internet permit data collection from large numbers of participants but sacrifice control over sound presentation and therefore are not widely employed in hearing research. To help standardize online sound presentation, we introduce a brief psychophysical test for determining whether online experiment participants are wearing headphones. Listeners judge which of three pure tones is quietest, with one of the tones presented 180° out of phase across the stereo channels. This task is intended to be easy over headphones but difficult over loudspeakers due to phase-cancellation. We validated the test in the lab by testing listeners known to be wearing headphones or listening over loudspeakers. The screening test was effective and efficient, discriminating between the two modes of listening with a small number of trials. When run online, a bimodal distribution of scores was obtained, suggesting that some participants performed the task over loudspeakers despite instructions to use headphones. The ability to detect and screen out these participants mitigates concerns over sound quality for online experiments, a first step toward opening auditory perceptual research to the possibilities afforded by crowdsourcing.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Speech and Hearing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c94966dcd9cb36ef1d817f020f876ee7790bf764
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- WavThruVec: Latent speech representation as intermediate features for neural speech synthesis (2022, background): “All participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) with requirement of minimal age of 18 years, 99% or higher approval rate on at least 5,000 previous tasks on AMT, residency in the US and wearing headphones (had to pass a pre-screening headphone check [33]).”