This MVC software was developped for a psychoacoustics experiment. During the experiment, binaural recordings will be presented to listeners, whose tasks are to:
- Rate each recording on the basis of 2 attributes: the Timbre and the Plausibility.
- Indicate whether they perceive the source incidence angle as being Frontal (facing towards them) or Lateral (facing to the side).
- Indicate whether they perceive the source as being Dynamic (performing 3DOF movements) or Static.
The rated sounds are recordings of a male voice uttering sentences while performing (or not) head movements. This voice could be either live-spoken or played through a loudspeaker (which reproduced the head movements of the human speaker): these two sound sources differ in directivity, which might lead to differences in quality ratings with the source orientation or movement. These sentences were recorded according to different states of the following variables:
| Source | Distance | Facing Angle | Movement Amplitude | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human | 1 m | Front | Small | True |
| Loudspeaker | 4 m | Side | Large | False |
3 different sentences were recorded thanks to a dummy head (Neumann KU100) for each combination of these variables (ex: a loudspeaker placed 1 meter away from the dummy head, facing the dummy head, displaying a sentence that implies large head movements but while performing no movement).
All these sentences are stored in the data/sentences.csv file. This file is used by the program to initialize the SQLite database. The sentences list was created using the code provided in the utils_manip_directivite repo.
The database contains a table storing all recordings, gathered from the data/sentences.csv file. Each user will complete one set of rating (containing a value for each of the 2 rated attributes and for the 2 direct questions) for each recording:
The database is initialized (i.e. the recordings, conditions, rooms and sentences tables are filled with the test data) if the initialize_db parameter of the initialize_app function of the app controller is set to true (see app.py). Setting initialize_db to True will have no effect if a database with tables matching the data already exists.
The database connection is set in the src/model/__init__.py file of the model package.
All required packages are listed in the requirements.txt file.
When launching the app, the app controller (src/controller/app_controller.py) instantiates a LoginController (src/controller/login_controller.py), which will manage the user sign in or log in thanks to the login view (src/view/login_view.py) and model (src/model/login_model.py).
The customtkinter view allows for creating a new user (an error message is displayed if both the first and last name isn't provided, or if a valid birthdate hasn't been given) or for logging in (the droplist at the bottom of the interface only shows the users that didn't rate all recordings yet).
Once a user is logged in, the LoginController gives back the control to the AppController, which instantiates a new RatingsController (src/controller/ratings_controller.py).
the RatingsController, along with a ratings view (src/view/ratings_view.py) and model (src/model/ratings_model.py) will record the user's rating for each recording:
Before each rating, the ratings model queries the database for a random recording that has not yet been rated by the logged user. If there is no such recording, the test ends. Otherwise, the ratings view is reset and the audio file matching the selected recording is played (through the audio player model src/model/audio_player_model.py that uses the pygame package).
During playback, the user is free to adjust the sliders matching their rating for each attribute and to select their answer for each direct question. Once the playback is done and the direct questions are answered, the user is free to validate and advance to the next recording.