# A New Technical Ear Training Game and Its Effect on Critical Listening Skills
## 1 Introduction  
### Critical Listening in Various Fields  
The audio engineering community has seen a growing interest in \"ear-training\" in recent years. The advancements in digital audio workstations and audio signal processing tools for audio/music production have made it easier for amateur musicians and engineers to produce music. Despite the ease of access to these advanced technologies, producing good sound quality remains a big challenge. People may know how to use the tools, but they often struggle to produce the desired sound without a strong aesthetic understanding of a sound field. To address this issue, audio engineering schools have updated their curricula with a greater focus on \"listening skills\" and \"musical training\" [1]. Contemporary students need to learn how to critically evaluate sounds and make adjustments to control their tools for the best possible sound quality. This shift in pedagogy is reflected in the increasing number of research activities and publications in the field. For example, two recent journal papers have been published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society [2; 3], demonstrating the growing interest in this area. In one of these papers, [PERSON] [3] provides a comprehensive review of previous and ongoing research in critical listening training, starting from [PERSON]'s pioneering works [4] in the late 1980s and [PERSON]'s breakthrough with the _Technical Ear Trainer (TET)_[5], a computerized ear-training program in the late 1990s. The paper also introduces the recent curricula of various audio education programs. The importance of ear training and critical listening extends beyond practical applications in audio engineering. Researchers have studied the relationship between listeners' level of training and experience, and the impact it has on their ability to critically \"evaluate\" sound quality. In this subjective sound quality evaluation, the experience and training of listeners has a \"huge impact on the data and its quality ([6], p. 87)\". Experts in the field have a higher sensitivity and ability to perceive differences, making them more reliable intheir assessments compared to untrained listeners. In practical situations, listening skill levels are dependent on the nature of the given tasks. For example, ITU-T Rec. P.800 [7] requires naive listeners, while ITU-R Rec. BS.1534-3 [8] requires experienced listeners. Recent studies on spatial attributes for three-dimensional (3D), immersive sound recording, and reproduction also revealed cognitive differences between naive and experienced listeners [9; 10]. According to ([6], p. 91), the difference between the expert and naive listeners lies in that \"the small expert panel may have the experience to discriminate repeatably complex stimuli using the scale with confidence\". [PERSON]'s study [11] indicated that untrained listeners prefer the same loudspeakers (and headphones) as the panel of trained listeners. However, trained listeners are more discriminating and reliable than untrained listeners, supported by their individual \(F_{L}\) statistics for the \"loudspeaker\" variable. \(F_{L}\) is defined as \"the ratio of the loudspeaker effect (mean sum of squares for loudspeaker (preference) ratings) divided by the error variance (mean sum of squares of the residual). This metric accounts for the listeners' ability to discriminate between loudspeakers as well as their ability to repeat their ratings\". If a smaller number of \"trained or expert\" subjects could bring an equivalent, meaningful conclusion quickly, it will save budget and time for researchers conducting a large number of subjective evaluations. To address this, companies that conduct a significant amount of subjective evaluations have formed listening panels consisting of trained or expert listeners, and have developed tools to assess and train their listening skills. For example, Harman International R&D has created a free training program called _Harman How to Listen_[12; 13], which is used to train their panel members.