Guinea Pig - Overview

guinea pig n
1: a small stout-bodied short-eared nearly tailless domesticated rodent (Cavia cobaya) often kept as a pet and widely used in biological research 2: a subject of scientific research, experimentation, or testing
- Webster

The goal of the GuineaPig project is to build a system that makes easier to create psychoacoustical listening test by taking care of some tedious routine tasks like creation of playlists. System will also automate the running of these tests.

Traditional procedure when making listening tests is such that the tester edits and records the whole test on a DAT-tape that is then played to the test subject. The test subjects listen to the test and mark their answers on paper. The tester then has to enter the answers manually to a computer to analyze them. GuineaPig eliminates the need to edit the whole test into a tape beforehand and removes the manual entering of the results. Also the test doesn't need to be the same for all subjects. The order, in which the individual test items consisting of sound samples are presented to the subject, can be very easily arranged to be different for each session.

The first phase is the test creation where the tester selects the test type, used sound samples and other test parameters. As the result configuration files are generated that contain the parameters needed in the test.

The test is then run for each test subject and results are saved. After the tests have been performed the results can be studied, processed and analyzed with some statistical programs.

Test types

A variety of test types have been implemented including: A flexible Generic Test class is used as base for all tests. Most tests listed above can be implemented with the generic test only.

Testing features

Many options and parameters allow customizing the tests. Most features are available for all tests.

Audio output features

The sound player handles the audio output of the GuineaPig system. It reads the sample files, mixes them together and sends the audio data to output devices. The player is written in C. A higher level Java module is provided for using the player.

The Sound Player uses the SGI Audio Library and the SGI Audio File Library, therefore all supported devices and sound file formats supported by them are available in GP. The audio devices includes the normal analog stereo outputs on most systems as well as the default or additional digital outputs up to eight digital channels on one device (ADAT). The supported audio file formats include: AIFF/AIFF-C, Next/Sun, Wave, MPEG1, raw data, and many more.

Some features of the sound player:

See also: SGI Audio Features.

Requirements

The system runs on and is designed only for Silicon Graphics' workstations with IRIX 6.3 or greater. The GP's sound player engine uses the newer SGI's Audio Library for IRIX 6.3 and up and POSIX threads (pthreads). In future versions, IRIX 6.5 will be required.

Most of the system is written in Java. Java 1.1 is required and it is freely available for download from SGI. In future, Java 1.2 (Java2) will be used.

Additional information

The GuineaPig web-page is located at:
www.acoustics.hut.fi/~hynde/GuineaPig2/index.html
The page contains the AES 106th GuineaPig paper and presentation slides presented at the AES 106th Convention, May 8-11 1999, Munich, Germany:
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Last modified: Wed Nov 10 14:45:33 EET 1999