Psycho‐Acoustics: Applied and Misapplied

Psychoacoustics and Sound Quality

In this chapter psycho-physical methods which are useful for both psycho-acoustics and sound-quality engineering will be discussed, namely, the methods of random access, the semantic differential, category scaling and magnitude estimation. Models of basic psycho-acoustic quantities like loudness, sharpness and roughness as well as composite metrics like psycho-acoustic annoyance will be introdu...

Psychoacoustics and cognition for musicians

Our experience of pitch, timing, loudness, and timbre in music depends in complex ways on physical measurements of frequency, time, amplitude, spectral envelope, and temporal envelope. Psychoacousticians, who investigate these dependencies, can shed light on basic musical questions. Psychoacoustics can explain the central role of frequency and time in music theory and notation, variations in th...

Acoustics, Psychoacoustics and Spectral Music

History of Psychoacoustics

Psychoacoustics, or rather Psychological Acoustics, plays a significant role to date in many areas of application within acoustics. It therefore has a long and vast history to look back upon. Within its history, one central figure is definitely Hermann von Helmholtz. He paved the way for interdisciplinary acoustic r esearch in his genius book “Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen”. At his laborato...

Reverberation Echo Density Psychoacoustics

A series of psychoacoustic experiments were carried out to explore the relationship between an objective measure of reverberation echo density, called the normalized echo density (NED), and subjective perception of the time-domain texture of reverberation. In one experiment, 25 subjects evaluated the dissimilarity of signals having static echo densities. The reported dissimilarities matched abs...