Human-machine interaction is increasingly dependent on speech communication, mainly due to the remarkable performance of Machine Learning models in speech recognition tasks. However, these models can be fooled by adversarial examples, which are inputs in-tentionally perturbed to produce a wrong prediction without the changes being noticeable to humans. While much research has focused on developing new techniques to generate adversarial perturbations, less attention has been given to aspects that determine whether and how the perturbations are noticed by humans. This question is relevant since high fool-ing rates of proposed adversarial perturbation strategies are only valuable if the perturba-tions are not detectable. In this paper we investigate to which extent the distortion metrics proposed in the literature for audio adversarial examples, and which are commonly applied to evaluate the effectiveness of methods for generating these attacks, are a reliable mea-sure of the human perception of the perturbations. Using an analytical framework, and an experiment in which 36 subjects evaluate audio adversarial examples according to different factors, we demonstrate that the metrics employed by convention are not a reliable measure of the perceptual similarity of adversarial examples in the audio domain. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )