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. Unlikeprevious comparisons, we focus on their suitability for production environments, an area currently underexplored in existing research. Twelve audio examples were tested using two evaluationtypes: an effectiveness test under progressively increasing degradations (hum, hiss, clipping, glitches) and a robustness test underfixed-level, randomly fluctuating degradations.In the effectiveness test, HAAQI, PEMO-Q, and PEAQ Basiceffectively tracked degradation changes, while PEAQ Advancedfailed consistently and ViSQOL showed low sensitivity to humand glitches. In the robustness test, ViSQOL and HAAQI demonstrated the highest consistency, with average standard deviationsof 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 eachmetric for music production, specifically quality measurement withcompressed audio. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available upon publication.