Post by cpruby on Mar 13, 2023 19:34:51 GMT
Hi all,
I was chatting in the discord thread about psychoacoustics and there was a request to make something that isn't as ethereal.
What is psychoacoustics?
Psychoacoustics is our perception of sound. Acoustics is the study of sound in the physical realm with air particles bouncing all over the place. Psych- prefix means mental or of the mind. So combining these into psychoacoustics leaves us with sound in the mind.
What does psychoacoustics cover?
Psychoacoustics will address things expected things like pitch perception and loudness perception. It also covers things like temporal perception (can a person perceive a small gap in a signal), binaural effects (the extra things having two ears provides), and similar extras.
Who are you to tell me about psychoacoustics and why should I believe anything you say?
Well, I teach an undergrad level course in hearing science and we touch on psychoacoustics. My day job is as an audiologist where I test hearing and program hearing aids. So hearing is in my wheelhouse, but I am not a psychoacoustics researcher.
Ok, well, what's one thing that will help starting out with psychoacoustics?
I would probably start with this concept called Weber's fraction. This is a simple concept that our perception is based on proportions. Let's make an example.
Let's say you pickup a box that weighs 1 pound and then you pickup a second box that weighs 2 pounds. It is pretty easy to figure out that the second box weighs more. If you are a researcher, you might say "ok, our resolution of detecting the weight of an object we're picking up is 1 pound." If we extrapolate this that we can sense 1 pound differences across our entire range. This is incorrect and I'll show you why.
Now lets repeat this experiment, but the first box weighs 101 pounds and the second is 102 pounds. Suddenly that second box feels very similar to the first box and if we didn't know which box was which, we wouldn't be able to accurately say which box is heavier. The contrast between the boxes is not high enough.
So this is the concept called the just noticeable difference (jnd). This is our resolution that we are able to sense the world. A lot of these early experiments were about determining the jnd. So they would play a 1000 Hz tone and then a 1001 Hz tone and see if a person can tell the difference. Repeat with a 1002 Hz tone, and again with a 1003 Hz. Usually at 1003 Hz people can tell the difference. That's 3 thousandths of the original tone. So using this as a proportion and we extrapolate this out, we would expect detection of a different tone between 100 Hz and 100.3 Hz.
I'll post more as I have time to talk about this stuff and I'll try to answer questions as well!
I was chatting in the discord thread about psychoacoustics and there was a request to make something that isn't as ethereal.
What is psychoacoustics?
Psychoacoustics is our perception of sound. Acoustics is the study of sound in the physical realm with air particles bouncing all over the place. Psych- prefix means mental or of the mind. So combining these into psychoacoustics leaves us with sound in the mind.
What does psychoacoustics cover?
Psychoacoustics will address things expected things like pitch perception and loudness perception. It also covers things like temporal perception (can a person perceive a small gap in a signal), binaural effects (the extra things having two ears provides), and similar extras.
Who are you to tell me about psychoacoustics and why should I believe anything you say?
Well, I teach an undergrad level course in hearing science and we touch on psychoacoustics. My day job is as an audiologist where I test hearing and program hearing aids. So hearing is in my wheelhouse, but I am not a psychoacoustics researcher.
Ok, well, what's one thing that will help starting out with psychoacoustics?
I would probably start with this concept called Weber's fraction. This is a simple concept that our perception is based on proportions. Let's make an example.
Let's say you pickup a box that weighs 1 pound and then you pickup a second box that weighs 2 pounds. It is pretty easy to figure out that the second box weighs more. If you are a researcher, you might say "ok, our resolution of detecting the weight of an object we're picking up is 1 pound." If we extrapolate this that we can sense 1 pound differences across our entire range. This is incorrect and I'll show you why.
Now lets repeat this experiment, but the first box weighs 101 pounds and the second is 102 pounds. Suddenly that second box feels very similar to the first box and if we didn't know which box was which, we wouldn't be able to accurately say which box is heavier. The contrast between the boxes is not high enough.
So this is the concept called the just noticeable difference (jnd). This is our resolution that we are able to sense the world. A lot of these early experiments were about determining the jnd. So they would play a 1000 Hz tone and then a 1001 Hz tone and see if a person can tell the difference. Repeat with a 1002 Hz tone, and again with a 1003 Hz. Usually at 1003 Hz people can tell the difference. That's 3 thousandths of the original tone. So using this as a proportion and we extrapolate this out, we would expect detection of a different tone between 100 Hz and 100.3 Hz.
I'll post more as I have time to talk about this stuff and I'll try to answer questions as well!
