Introduction

This chapter describes the basic motivations and the guiding principles of sensory evaluation, applied to the domain of sound perception. It considers when and why to apply sensory evaluation and some common terminology and concepts will be introduced to aid further reading. The origins of sensory evaluation have evolved rapidly from the food and consumer product industries since the 1950s with the development of methods to evaluate consumer preference using hedonic scales. Sensory science continues to be strongly developed in these fields for product development, production testing and validation, both in terms of sensory evaluation methodologies and statistical analysis techniques, also referred to as sensometrics. The application of sensory evaluation to sound is deeply rooted in the history of psychoacoustics. The concept of a method should be equally applicable to sensory evaluation of sound, other senses, food and other products.