Validation

DEBUSSY's parameter set was validated on a 60-track benchmark spanning the stimulus families used in the BELL-001 protocol (breath / ambient / musical excerpts). The benchmark exists to check two things:

1. Numerical stability — every parameter is finite and reproducible across repeated runs and across the 44.1 kHz / 48 kHz sample rates commonly found in stimulus libraries (mosqito resamples internally to 48 kHz; see the resample notes).
2. Discrimination — the parameters separate calm from arousing material in the directions predicted by the psychoacoustic literature (e.g. higher roughness and sharpness for harsher excerpts).

Reference ranges

The per-parameter reference ranges used by the three-tier compliance check are tabulated in reference_ranges.md. They follow Zwicker & Fastl (2007) for sharpness and roughness and the paper's own analysis for the level, spectral, and temporal descriptors. The ranges are directional guidance, not hard cut-offs — Tier 1 is the only pass/fail gate.

Reproducing the benchmark

The benchmark tracks are analysed exactly as any short file — in full, byte for byte — so the published values are reproducible from the public API:

from debussy import analyze_audio, write_csv

results = [analyze_audio(p) for p in benchmark_paths]
write_csv(results, "benchmark.csv")

See examples/batch_report.py for a folder-level driver. The numeric summary and figures are maintained in paper/paper.md; this page is updated as the licensed A1 (Mindlab) and A3 (commercial-reference) sets are processed.

Sample-rate handling

Level and spectral descriptors are computed at the file's native rate. The psychoacoustic descriptors (roughness, sharpness) are computed by mosqito, which requires 48 kHz and resamples other rates internally, printing a one-line notice. Pass suppress_warnings=True to silence it in batch runs. The reported sample_rate is always the file's native rate.