Measuring the immersive music listening experience: Convergence of online and laboratory data

The immersive experience of media such as music, films, games, and virtual reality is becoming increasingly important in the entertainment industry. The 10-item Immersive Music Experience Inventory (IMEI) was recently developed in an online study to measure the immersive experience of listening to music via headphones. However, it had not yet been tested in a laboratory setting with loudspeaker playback. Therefore, the first aim of this study was to validate the IMEI in a laboratory context using techniques from classical test theory, including a reanalysis of data from the online study, and item response theory. The second aim was to compare immersive experiences of listening to headphone playback in the online study and loudspeaker playback in the laboratory study after testing for invariance. Based on data from 57 participants listening to 29 stimuli in various audio formats through loudspeakers in a laboratory, the IMEI showed a reasonable fit in a confirmatory factor analysis and good reliability. Evaluation of these data using the probabilistic model of many-facet Rasch measurement resulted in a good fit both overall and for the items and the response scale. Based on two musical examples presented in the audio formats of mono, stereo, and three-dimensional (3D) audio in both studies (online and laboratory), we found evidence for measurement invariance. The comparison between listening conditions suggests that listeners have similar immersive experiences when listening through headphones and loudspeakers. We conclude that the IMEI is a reliable and valid measure of immersive music listening experiences in both contexts.