There are a range of different methods for comparing or measuring the similarity between environmental sound effects. These methods can be used as objective evaluation techniques, to evaluate the effectiveness of a sound synthesis method by assessing the similarity between synthesised sounds and recorded samples. We propose to evaluate a number of different synthesis objective evaluation metrics, by using the different distance metrics as fitness functions within a resynthesis algorithm. A recorded sample is used as a target sound, and the resynthesis is intended to produce a set of synthesis parameters that will synthesise a sound as close to the recorded sample as possible, within the restrictions of the synthesis model. The recorded samples are excerpts of selections from a sound effects library, and the results are evaluated through a subjective listening test. Results show that one of the objective function performs significantly worse than several others. Only one method had a significant and strong correlation between the user perceptual distance and the objective distance. A recommendation of an objective evaluation function for measuring similarity between synthesised environmental sounds is made.

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