Psychoacoustics of Soft Clipping and its Perception as a Clean Type of Distortion

• Vallejo Reyes, Mario Alberto (ckb535@york.ac.uk)

This study examined the psychoacoustics of soft clipping and its perception as a 'clean' type of distortion. It began with an exploration of various types of distortions through background theory, followed by a review of listening tests from the study by Tan, Moore, and Zacharov. MATLAB was utilized to synthesize different types of distortions using custom functions created for this research, and time/frequency analyses were performed on these distortions.

The findings from the frequency domain analysis, specifically waveform and spectrogram analyses, of the synthesized distortion types, objectively reinforced the conclusions of the reviewed listening tests. They demonstrated that soft clipping was the distortion type among those analyzed that most closely resembled the original signal. This supported the notion of soft clipping as a comparatively clean form of distortion, providing valuable insights for applications in audio processing and sound design.

• 2023