Moulton Laboratories
Moulton Laboratories provides master consulting expertise in the areas of audio, music, acoustics, education and measurement.
Acoustical Consulting and Design
I often help people solve acoustical problems in their studios, occasionally elsewhere (I have done a fair amount of noise pollution work in the past). Such help usually includes guidance regarding sound isolation, sound treatment and related air-handling issues. Often, advice can be as rudimentary as where to put a console and loudspeakers. Sometimes, people want to know what, if anything, to put on walls, ceilings and floors. Or, they may want to design a studio building from scratch.I haves designed recording studios, performance spaces and related areas for a range of clients and applications. I've also developed a low-cost studio topology (a "Moulton Room") which yields excellent results for very low cost in many project studio situations.
Educational Consulting
I am available, subject to some time constraints, to offer curricular design and consulting services for educational institutions as well as manufacturers and publishers interested in the field of audio education. Due to my extensive experience in all phases of the field, I can provide powerful and extremely well-founded insights on how to optimize an offering, service or product for such applications.Subjective Testing and Analysis
On occasion, I have been involved in the measurement of the subjective perceptions of audio systems, devices and processes. Clients have included telecommunications, signal-processing, speaker, microphone and cable manufacturers, and magazines. My son, Mark Moulton (a psychometrician with a doctorate from the University of Chicago), has developed some unique applications for audio derived from his work using a statistical technique called the Rasch Model. The result is a powerful and accurate testing modality for those manufacturers who really need to know how their products sound.How does it sound?
It's subjective. Some people like it, some don't.
How do you measure something like that?
Our testing analysis methods permit us to develop robust and detailed analyses of the subjective listeners' answers. These analyses provide our clients with unprecedented detail and reliability regarding their products' performance. We are able to provide information about the performance of test listeners, how the program material affected the outcome, and meaningful predictions about how the devices will be received by a variety of listeners auditioning a variety of programs.
We can correlate our findings to a number of physical, social and psychological characteristics of the test variables. For instance, we can show a client how gender, age, economic status, and/or professional experience may correlate with their observed preferences, and predict how such correlations will occur in the public at large for their products. We can do turn-key studies, analyze data collected by the client, or simply consult in regard to the effectiveness of a variety of test approaches.
Consult our AES papers for more detail on the sort of work we do:
All such research is offered on a custom test design basis, subject to time constraints and availability. We can provide either turnkey testing projects or we can assist in data analysis of already collected data sets. Please contact me (David Moulton) to intitiate the dialogue leading to a test design proposal and quote, if you are interested in this service.Measurement of Small Impairments of Perceptual Audio Coders Using a 3-Facet Rasch Model, with Mark Moulton, Ph.D., 104th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May, 1998.
Codec "Transparency," Listener "Severity," Program "Intolerance:" Suggestive Relationships between Rasch Measures and Some Background Variables, with Mark Moulton, Ph.D., 105th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, San Francisco, CA, September, 1998.