Download Subjective Evaluation of Sound Quality and Control of Drum Synthesis with Stylewavegan
In this paper we investigate into perceptual properties of StyleWaveGAN, a drum synthesis method proposed in a previous publication. For both, the sound quality as well as the control precision StyleWaveGAN has been shown to deliver state of the art performance for quantitative metrics (FAD and MSE of the control parameters). The present paper aims to provide insight into the perceptual relevance of these results. Accordingly, we performed a subjective evaluation of the sound quality as well as a subjective evaluation of the precision of the control using timbre descriptors from the AudioCommons toolbox. We evaluate the sound quality with mean opinion score and make measurements of psychophysical response to the variations of the control. By means of the perceptual tests, we demonstrate that StyleWaveGAN produces better sound quality than state-of-the-art model DrumGAN and that the mean control error is lower than the absolute threshold of perception at every point of measurement used in the experiment.