Methodological approaches to investigate the effects of meaning, expectations and context in listening experiments

Cognitive factors in sound evaluation have received an increasing amount of attention over the past years, and specific effects of meaning, expectations, and context have been under empirical investigation. The present paper is intended to contribute to the theoretical definition of these concepts as well as to demonstrate their impact on the auditory assessments in selected empirical studies. To that effect, first the effects of source identifiability on loudness and annoyance judgements of environmental sounds are presented. Further, the concept of user expectations and its implications in applied situations is illustrated with examples from automotive research and development, pointing to the fundamental distinction between sound character and sound quality as proposed by [1]. Finally, the term context is defined within the theoretical framework of reference frames, and effects.