EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF OBJECTIVE AUDIO QUALITY METRICS IN RESPONSE TO COMMON AUDIO DEGRADATIONS

This study evaluates the performance of five objective audio quality metrics—PEAQ Basic, PEAQ Advanced, PEMO-Q, ViSQOL,
and HAAQI —in the context of digital music production. Unlike
previous comparisons, we focus on their suitability for production environments, an area currently underexplored in existing research. Twelve audio examples were tested using two evaluation
types: an effectiveness test under progressively increasing degradations (hum, hiss, clipping, glitches) and a robustness test under
fixed-level, randomly fluctuating degradations.
In the effectiveness test, HAAQI, PEMO-Q, and PEAQ Basic
effectively tracked degradation changes, while PEAQ Advanced
failed consistently and ViSQOL showed low sensitivity to hum
and glitches. In the robustness test, ViSQOL and HAAQI demonstrated the highest consistency, with average standard deviations
of 0.004 and 0.007, respectively, followed by PEMO-Q (0.021),
PEAQ Basic (0.057), and PEAQ Advanced (0.065). However,
ViSQOL also showed low variability across audio examples, suggesting limited genre sensitivity.
These findings highlight the strengths and limitations of each
metric for music production, specifically quality measurement with
compressed audio. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available upon publication.