See the Data

This part of the Lab connects your listening experiences to empirical data from psychoacoustic studies. You can:

  • explore how acoustic hardness and punch relate to perceived heaviness,
  • audition individual stimuli directly from the scatterplots,
  • examine how different producers cluster in hardness–heaviness space,
  • and inspect additional metrics such as crest factor and loudness range.

The aim is not to reduce heaviness to a single number, but to show where models capture perceptual tendencies, where they fall short, and how they interact with production choices.

How to use these views

  • Start by selecting a subset of stimuli (for example, all choruses, or all guitar-only stems).
  • Click on points along a diagonal band: do they sound similarly heavy, or are there perceptible differences?
  • Find outliers: segments that are judged very heavy but have only moderate hardness, or vice versa. What production choices explain them?
  • Compare producers: do some cluster in a harder or softer region? Do their stems show similar or different patterns?