European project · Digital society
The Great Sound Experiment
An app to find out how well the human ear can tell the quality of compressed audio
About the project
Can we tell the difference in quality between two MP3 files compressed at different bitrates? How far can the human ear go in telling audio quality formats apart? The Great Sound Experiment set out to answer these questions.
It did so with an Android mobile app that set a challenge: it played pairs of identical sounds with different encodings, and participants had to choose the one that sounded better.
Project objectives
The information gathered in the challenge was meant to produce statistics and find the threshold at which the human ear can no longer tell apart the encodings of the most popular audio formats on the internet, depending on factors such as age, sex, musical training or headphone quality.
Our activities
- Development and publication of the app on Google Play.
Project details
Type of project
European
Duration
2019
Area
Digital society