Sound Label for Household Appliances

Household appliances and their sound quality are important for our daily life quality. However the appropriate characterization of their sound is a difficult task. Not only product users but also manufacturers can profit from a sound label which characterize the perception of the customers. The purchase decision-making process according to acoustic criteria will be supported by such kind of label. In addition, a label and its components give orientation to the manufacturers during their product development process. Essential aspect for such kind of label is that it should represent the perception of the customers. Therefore psychoacoustical properties, e.g., loudness, sharpness, roughness, tonality, etc., are advantageous for characterization purposes. It would be beneficial to combine these psychoacoustical descriptors into a sound quality label, which is easy to understand. The authors have developed several sound labels for household appliances based on psychoacoustic properties. These sound labels are the result of the listening experiments which were conducted with potential customers. In this paper, various aspects of these investigations are summarized, extended and discussed.