Audio Quality Testing Stimuli

This page contains the experimental stimuli for the audio quality research that has been published in the following ASSETS 19 paper:

Linda Kozma-Spytek, Paula Tucker, and Christian Vogler. 2019. Voice Telephony for Individuals with Hearing Loss: The Effects of Audio Bandwidth, Bit Rate and Packet Loss. In The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3-15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3353796

Important: Please note that the two different datasets have different use rights. In particular, the Harvard stimuli may not be used commercially. The full terms of use can be found in each respective Zip archive.

CASPER Sentence Sets

These sentence sets were used in Experiments 1 and 2 in the ASSETS 19 paper.

All products and publications using them must reference the following: The CASPER sentence set was developed by the RERC on Hearing Enhancement at Gallaudet University, under a grant by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, U.S. Department of Education, grant number H1343E98.

If you use the experimental stimuli themselves, please also cite the ASSETS 19 paper above.

Harvard Sentence Sets

These sentence sets were used in Experiment 3 in the ASSETS 19 paper.

They are based on recordings made by Advanced Hearing Concepts, Inc.(AHC). The stimuli used in the paper specifically correspond to the IEEE Harvard Sentence sets 11, 14-17, 19, 21-23, 25-26, 29, and are a subset of a larger set of recordings by AHC. AHC used the 1947 version of the Harvard sentences, published in:

Hudgins, C. V., Hawkins, J. E., Kaklin, J. E., & Stevens, S. S. (1947). The development of recorded auditory tests for measuring hearing loss for speech. The Laryngoscope, 57(1), 57-89.

Those sentences were revised in “1965 Revised List of Phonetically Balanced Sentences (Harvard Sentences),” which were published in the IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics, vol 17 issue 3, 225-246, 1969. Although the subset of the sentence lists used in these experimental stimuli are identical to those published in the IEEE revision, the full list of sentences that the stimuli are based on should be referred to as the AHC Revised Audio-Video Recordings of Phonetically Balanced Sentences.

The AHC Revised Audio-Video Recordings of Phonetically Balanced Sentences may be used for research purposes only. Whoever has access to the recordings must be advised that the recordings are available for non-profit research purposes only. The recordings are the property of Advanced Hearing Concepts Inc. and whoever has access to the recordings does not have permission to sell the recordings or profit financially in any way from the recordings.

If you use the experimental stimuli themselves, please also cite the ASSETS 19 paper above.