The Perception of Distortion

Earl R. Geddes, GedLee LLC

Lidia W. Lee, EMU

Acoustic Science
 What is the goal?
■ To find a metric of nonlinear distortion which
is highly correlated to subjective perception.
■ As measures of distortion, THD and IMD do
not take into account masking effects of the
human ear.
 They are purely mathematical relationships
between the input and the output of a system.
 As such, there really is no reason to believe that
they should indicate the perception of the system
nonlinearity which they represent.

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 Our intent
Our intent in this work is:
1. to model the perception of distortion
by taking into consideration the
human ear, namely masking.
2. to use this model to develop a better
metric of nonlinear distortion.
3. to test this metric against the current
standards of THD and IMD.

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 Our approach
■ Our model is based on a form of
nonlinear system identification known
as the Volterra Series.
■ Ours is a model of the perception of
the distortion.
 It is not intended as a model of the
system creating this distortion, although,
Volterra models can be made to work for
nearly any nonlinear system.

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 Simplifications
■ In order to be manageable some
simplifications must be made to the
Volterra kernels.
■ We won’t elaborate on a detailed
justification for these simplifications,
but they can be simply stated as:
 The Volterra kernels for our purposes are
adequately represented by a single line
in each orders space - where all the
frequencies are all equal.

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 Justification
■ This simplification is based on one
proposed by J.C.Peyton Jones and
S.A.Billings in their 1990 paper
 “Interpretation of non-linear frequency
response functions”
Int.J.Control, Vol. 52, No. 2
 “Another approach, therefore, might be to
sacrifice the detail of such descriptions for
the clarity of the unidimensional response”

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 The model
■ Our model is a series of one
dimensional representations of
the Volterra kernels, each of
which represents the frequency
response of a single order kernel
to a simple sine wave excitation.
■ A block diagram of this model is
shown on the following slide.

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 Frequency
Orders
responses

1st
Σ

2nd

3rd

nth

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 The nonlinear transfer
characteristic
■ For the moment consider that we
are either looking at a single
frequency or that the frequency
responses of the orders are
uniform.
■ Then the nonlinear transfer
characteristic T(x) can be easily
shown graphically as in the next
slide:
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 The nonlinear transfer
characteristic
1

Output

-1
-1 0 1
Input
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 The orders
■ The orders for these functions can be
found as a simple Taylor series:

T (x, f ) = ∑a n( f ) x n

The coefficients an( f ) represent the

contributions of the nonlinear orders of
interest in this presentation.

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 A better metric
■ To find a metric which is a better
predictor of the perception of a
systems distortion, we need to take
into account the most significant
effects of the human hearing system
– namely masking.
■ To proceed we need to review some
of the characteristics of masking.

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 Masking
■ A topic in itself, the main features that
we are trying to incorporate are:
1. Masking is predominately upward
toward higher frequencies, although
masking does occur in both directions.
2. The masking effect increases – masking
occurs further away from the masker –
at a substantial rate with excitation
level.

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 Implications to distortion perception
1. Distortion by-products that are created upward
in frequency are likely to be less perceptible
(masked to a greater extent) than those that fall
lower in frequency.
2. Distortion by-products that lie closer to the
excitation are less likely to be perceived than
those that lie farther away (masking is a
localized effect – it mostly occurs in the vicinity
of the masker).
3. Distortion by-products of any kind are likely to
be more perceptible at lower signal levels than
at higher signal levels. (Less masking occurs at
lower signal levels)

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 Example at low signal level

low order nonlinearity high order nonlinearity

low signal level

magnitude

Frequency

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 Example high signal level

Low order nonlinearity High order nonlinearity

high signal level

magnitude

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 Hypothesized principles
1. The masking effect of the human ear will
tend to make higher order nonlinearities
more audible than lower order ones.
2. Nonlinear by-products that increase with
level can be completely masked if the order
of the nonlinearity is low.
3. Nonlinearities that occur at low signal levels
will be more audible than those that occur
at higher signal levels.

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 The metric should be:
1. more sensitive to higher order
nonlinearities than lower order
ones.
2. weighted towards greater values for
nonlinearities at lower signal levels.
3. immune to changes in offset and
gain (first order slope) since, as
distortion, these are inaudible
effects.
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 The GedLee Metric
■ We propose the following metric
which we will refer to as Gm

∫
1 2 2
  xπ  d 
2
Gm ( f ) = cos  2   T2 (x , f )  dx
−1
    dx 

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 Comments
■ To be useful we must show this metric provides
a better correlation to actual subjective
evaluations than current metrics.
■ A study was performed to determine if this new
metric holds any promise as a better metric
than the current ones - THD and IMD.
■ Our purpose was not to test the entire
applicability of Gm, but to do a simplified and
more manageable test to see if there is merit
in continuing.

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 The assumptions
■ The limiting assumption used in
this test is that the nonlinearities
have no frequency dependence.
■ Real systems can have frequency
dependent nonlinearities, most
notably loudspeakers, but many
systems have no frequency
dependent nonlinearities – i.e.
most amplifiers.

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 Participants
■ The test involved 42 individuals
with normal hearing sensitivity.
■ Each participant took a hearing
test just prior to the testing.
■ The participants ages ranged
from 19 – 39 (mean = 21).
■ Participants were paid for their
participation.

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 The test
■ The test averaged about 1 hour
but varied from 45 minutes to 1.5
hours.
■ The test was administered by a
graduate student who had no
knowledge of the tests intent –
double blind.

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 The source
■ The Music of the Night passage was
chosen for several reasons.
 It had voice, almost solo at times, as well
as accompanied.
 It had very loud and very soft passages.

■ It was felt that the selection of only a

single passage was the only workable
alternative for a simple first test.
 The effect of source material is currently under
investigation

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 The apparatus
■ The source was recorded directly from the
CD into a wav file. This file became the
reference.
■ Twenty one distorted wav files were
created using MathCad.
■ The wav files were all 16 bit, 44.1 kHz.
files. The sound output was reproduced by
a Turtle Beech Santa Cruz sound card. The
output transducers used for the study were
Etymotic ER-4 MicroPro earphones.

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 The nonlinear transfer functions

■ There were 21 nonlinear transfer

functions created for this study.
■ It is not feasible or necessary to
show all 21 files, but a few are
shown on the following slides.

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 Nonlinear Transfer functions

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 Nonlinear Transfer functions

Scale = .01

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 Nonlinear Transfer functions

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 Nonlinear Transfer functions

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 The metrics
■ The twenty one nonlinear transfer functions
were fed with sine waves for THD and two
tones for IMD distortion in order to obtain
standard metric values.
■ Spectra-Plus was used to measure the
distortions of each of these system
nonlinearities directly from the wav files.
■ The Gm values were calculated directly in
MathCAD since the nonlinear functions were
know exactly.

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 The scale
7-Point Scale Sub-Scale
Better Than Reference -10 to -6
Imperceptible -5 to 4
Barely Perceptible 5 to 14
Perceptible Slightly Annoying 15 to 24
Annoying 25 to 34
Very Annoying 35 to 44
Intolerable 45 to 50

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 Results THD

Correlation = -. 423
p = 0.06

4
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 Results IMD

Correlation = -.345
p = 0.13

4
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 Gm (values < 10.0)

4
Correlation = .94
p < 0.001

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 Conclusions

1. This study offers strong support

for the contention that distortion
metrics must include some form
of masking model.
2. The proposed metric Gm appears
to work very well for values of Gm
< 10.0.

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 Implications
1. Subjects will find a systems
nonlinear distortion “inaudible” if
Gm < 1.0
2. Subjects will rate the distortion
“barely perceptible” if Gm < 3.0
3. Unlike THD or IMD these
statements can be made with a
very high degree of confidence

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 Conclusions
■ THD and IMD have no correlation to the
subjectively perceived distortion in a
nonlinear system.
■ This study offers strong support for the
contention that distortion metrics must
include some form of masking model.
■ A new metric, Gm, is proposed which has
been shown to have a very high level of
correlation to the subjective perception of
distortion in a nonlinear system.

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