webMUSHRA

a MUltiple Stimuli with Hidden Reference and Anchor (MUSHRA) compliant web audio API based experiment software.

Introduction

Listening tests are widely used to assess the quality of audio systems. In the last few years, conducting listening experiments over the Internet, as so called web-based experiments, has become popular. Until now, it was only possible to implement a limited number of listening test types as web-based experiments because web standards were missing some crucial features, e.g. sample manipulation of audio streams. MUSHRA tests are designed to compare the audio quality of several test conditions with intermediate impairments to a high quality reference. With the rise of Web Audio API, for the first time MUSHRA experiments can be carried out within the web browser while at the same time being compliant to the ITU-R Recommendation BS.1534 (MUSHRA).

View Demo

Download Package

Features

page based experiments supporting:
- MUSHRA (ITU-R BS.1534)
- AB (ITU-R BS.1116)
- Likert scale questionaires
- training/introduction
- spatial attributes, such as ASW, LEV, and localization (experimental)
compliant to ITU recommendations (looping, fade-in/out, sample accurate switching)
finish page to gather the results and send them to a provided PHP service
client side processing using the Web Audio API
simple configuration using YAML preference files
automatically generates ITU-R compliant lower anchor files on the fly
keyboard shortcuts for interaction with main UI elements

Supported Browsers

Google Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux

Getting started: Setting up webMUSHRA

To load audio files and save the results as csv text files, webMUSHRA needs to run on a web server. If you already have php installed on your system (for example on Mac OS X), you can run a php development server on port 8000 from the terminal using php -S localhost:8000.

Now you can run webMUSHRA using the following URL: http://localhost:8000

Another way to run webMUSHRA would be to install a complete web server stack like XAMPP.

The experiment configurations are stored in the configs/ folder. To load a configuration/experiment, specify the config argument in the url http://localhost:8000/?config=mushra_showresults.yaml.

Change or add a configuration

webMUSHRA uses YAML to configure experiments. Since YAML is using whitespace indentation (no tab characters!), we recommend to use a text editor like Atom that ships with YAML support.

A simple MUSHRA test in YAML looks like this:

pages:
  - type: mushra
    id: Item 1
    name: Orchestra
    content: Add additional notes for the participants
    showWaveform: true
    reference: reference.wav
    createAnchor35: true
    createAnchor70: true
    stimuli:
      C1: codec1.wav
      C2: codec2.wav
      C3: codec3.wav

The specific parameters are described in the Experimenters Manual.

Documentation

Citation

If you want to cite webMUSHRA, please refer to this publication (see References for the link to the paper):

"Towards the Next Generation of Web-based Experiments: A Case Study Assessing Basic Audio Quality Following the ITU-R Recommendation BS.1534 (MUSHRA)", Michael Schoeffler, Fabian-Robert Stöter, Bernd Edler and Jürgen Herre, 1st Web Audio Conference, 2015, Paris, France.

References

Copyright/Licence

This source code is protected by copyright law and international treaties. This source code is made available to you subject to the terms and conditions of the Software License for the webMUSHRA.js Software. Said terms and conditions have been made available to you prior to your download of this source code. By downloading this source code you agree to be bound by the above mentionend terms and conditions, which can also be found here. Any unauthorised use of this source code may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under law.

jundengdeng/webMUSHRA