Applause signals are the sound of many persons gathered in one place clapping their hands and are a prominent part of live music recordings. Usually, applause signals are recorded together or alongside with the live performance and serve to evoke the feeling of participation in a real event within the playback recipient. Applause signals can be very different in character, depending on the audience size, location, event type, and many other factors. To characterize different types of applause signals, the attribute of ‘density’ appears to be suitable. This paper reports first investigations whether density is an adequate perceptual attribute to describe different types of applause. We describe the design of a listening test assessing density and the synthesis of suitable, strictly controlled stimuli for the test. Finally, we provide results, both on strictly controlled and on naturally recorded stimuli, that confirm the suitability of the attribute density to describe important aspects of the perception of different applause signal characteristics.

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Applause is the result of many individuals rhythmically clapping their hands. Applause recordings exhibit a certain temporal, timbral and spatial structure: claps originating from a distinct direction (i.e, from a particular person) usually have a similar timbre and occur in a quasi-periodic repetition. Traditional upmix approaches for blind mono-to-stereo upmix do not consider these properties and may therefore produce an output with suboptimal perceptual quality to be attributed to a lack of plausibility. In this paper, we propose a blind upmixing approach of applause-like signals which aims at preserving the natural structure of applause signals by incorporating periodicity and timbral similarity of claps into the upmix process and therefore supporting plausibility of the artificially generated spatial scene. The proposed upmix approach is evaluated by means of a subjective preference listening test.

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