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The Effect of Frequency Spectrum on Temporal Integration of Energy in the Ear
Abstract
These experiments are designed to test the following hypothesis. The rate of the temporal integration of energy in the ear (at threshold) is dependent on the width of the frequency band of the energy to be integrated. Duration is exactly equivalent to intensity only when all the energy to be integrated is in a narrow band of frequencies. The hypothesis tested by taking advantage of the spectral distribution of energy in short tones. As a tone becomes very short, the effective band width of the energy increases. The band width of energy is essentially defined by the reciprocal of the duration of the tone. Thus as the duration of a tone decreases, not only does the total energy in that tone decrease, but the band width of energy also increases. The intensity threshold, then, has to be increased (as duration is decreased) to compensate for both effects if the hypothesis is correct. The results are in line with the predictions of the hypothesis. The width of the band necessary for maximum integration is also related to frequency and the width of critical bands.
... From Garner and Miller (1947). Garner (1947) further examined the possible role of frequency on the integration process by measuring detection thresholds in quiet for noise bursts and for 250-, 1000-, and 4000-Hz tone pulses. Durations ranged from 1 to 100 ms (except at 250 Hz where the shortest duration was 4 ms). ...
... Durations ranged from 5 periods to 500 ms. Their results are in good agreement with those from Garner (1947). Because they did not test signal durations greater than 500 ms, Garner (1947) and Florentine et al. (1988) could not estimate the time constant of the linear integrator. ...
... Their results are in good agreement with those from Garner (1947). Because they did not test signal durations greater than 500 ms, Garner (1947) and Florentine et al. (1988) could not estimate the time constant of the linear integrator. ...
Many audio applications, such as sound analysis-synthesis tools or audio codecs, call for specific signal representations enabling the analysis, processing, and synthesis of non stationary signals. Most of them are concerned with time-frequency (TF) representations such as the Gabor and wavelet transforms that allow decomposing any real-world sound into a set of elementary functions (or “atoms”) well localized in the TF domain. On the purpose of adapting these representations to the human auditory perception, the present study investigated auditory masking in the TF domain. Masking has been extensively investigated with simultaneous (frequency masking) and non-simultaneous (temporal masking) presentation of masker and target. A few studies examined TF relations of masking between masker and target. Because those studies involved stimuli that are not maximally compact in the TF plane (i.e., they were temporally and/or spectrally broad), their results are not suitable for predicting masking effects between TF atoms. In this study, we investigated auditory TF masking with masker and target signals having minimum spread in the TF plane, namely Gaussian-shaped sinusoids (referred to as Gaussians). The masker had a carrier frequency of 4 kHz and a level of 60 dB SL. Masker and target were separated either in frequency, in time, or both. The results of the TF conditions provide the TF spread of masking for stimuli that are maximally concentrated in the TF domain. The results of the simultaneous and non-simultaneous conditions allowed to show that a simple superposition of frequency and temporal masking functions does not provide an accurate representation of the measured TF masking function for Gaussian maskers. Two additional experiments were carried out that examined the effects of masker level and masker frequency in simultaneous conditions. Decreasing the masker level from 60 to 30 dB SL resulted in a reversal of the masking patterns' asymmetry and a narrowing of the frequency spread of masking. The frequency spread of masking at 0.75 kHz was similar to that obtained at 4 kHz when compared on an ERB scale. This is compatible with the constant-Q frequency analysis by the human auditory system. Finally, a first attempt was made to implement the gathered masking data in a sound signal processing algorithm allowing to remove the perceptually irrelevant atoms in the TF representations of audio signals. Potential applications of such an approach are, for instance, audio codecs and sound analysis-synthesis tools.
... Thresholds do not only depend on frequency but also on the envelope and, thus, also on the duration of the stimuli. Several studies on the perception of sounds with frequencies in the classical audio-frequency range show that thresholds tend to decrease with increasing stimulus duration, an effect which is commonly referred to as temporal integration (e.g., [22][23][24][25]). For stimuli with frequencies between 500 Hz and 4 kHz, thresholds decrease by about 20/2 dB to 20/3 dB per tenfold increase in stimulus duration, equivalent to about 3 dB to 2 dB per doubling of the duration [25]. ...
... The data of the present study show that thresholds continue to decrease at least up to a duration of three seconds for the two frequencies that were considered. This stimulus duration is considerably longer than durations that are typically used for stimuli in the classical audio-frequency range (e.g., [22][23][24][25]). ...
Infrasounds are signals with frequencies below the classical audio-frequency range, i.e., below 20 Hz. Several previous studies have shown that infrasound is audible as well, provided that the sound level is high enough. Hence, the sound pressure levels at threshold are much higher than those in the classical audio-frequency range. The present study investigates how the duration and the shape of the temporal envelope affect thresholds of infrasound stimuli in quiet. Two envelope types were considered: one where the duration of the steady state was varied (plateau bursts) and one where the number of consecutive onset-offset bursts was varied (multiple bursts). Stimuli were presented monaurally to human listeners by means of a low-distortion sound reproduction system. For both envelope types, thresholds decrease with increasing duration, a phenomenon often referred to as temporal integration. At the same duration, thresholds for plateau-burst stimuli are typically lower than those for multiple-burst stimuli. The data are well described by a slightly modified version of a model that was previously developed to account for temporal integration in the classical audio-frequency range. The results suggest similar mechanisms underlying the detection of stimuli with frequencies in the infrasound and in the classical audio-frequency range. Since the model accounts for the effect of duration and, more generally, the shape of the envelope, it can be used to enhance the comparability of existing and future datasets of thresholds for infrasounds with different temporal stimulus parameters.
... El estudio de los mecanismos neurobiológicos del procesamiento auditivo central incluye características espectrales, temporales e interhemisféricos de la señal acústica, cuyos primeros estudios datan de Garner en 1947 3 . De estos elementos, el procesamiento temporal es considerado uno de los componentes más importantes, ya que nos permite procesar y percibir adecuadamente todos los elementos del tiempo en la audición y, de esta manera, distinguir en forma precisa un momento de silencio dentro de una secuencia de estímulos auditivos. ...
... De esta forma, los gaps de silencio entre estímulos auditivos permiten una adecuada discriminación temporal auditiva, es decir, diferenciar dos estímulos sonoros como distintos 2,5,6 . La evaluación perceptual de las respuestas a gaps de silencio para estimar la discriminación temporal auditiva se viene realizando hace varias décadas 3,7,9 , siendo el método más utilizado y estandarizado la prueba de gaps in noise (GIN), desarrollada por Musiek y colaboradores en el año 2005 10 . La evaluación de umbrales de GIN permite determinar si una persona tiene habilidades de percepción temporal auditiva en rango normal, que para GIN debe ser de 2 a 3 milisegundos de silencio 11 . ...
The brain has different states of operation, one of them is the absence of auditory stimulation or silent states. To assess the capacity to detect auditory silent periods, various tests have been developed, including behavioral and electrophysiological evaluations. Brain responses to silence can be evaluated with brain oscillations and evoked potentials. This area promises important clinical applicability, for example, in pathologies like tinnitus, a condition in which there is no silent state, where it is believed that the evaluation of brain responses to silence could emerge as a new marker or diagnostic element. In this article we review different methods used for assessing brain responses to sound in animal models and humans.
... Several psycho-acoustic studies have analyzed intensity-duration trade-offs in sound perception. The results mostly suggest that the stimulus energy is the crucial variable (Garner, 1947;Plomp and Bouman, 1959;Zwislocki, 1965;Florentine et al., 1988). However, the long time constants required to fit the data (several hundred milliseconds) are difficult to reconcile with the high temporal resolution of the auditory system. ...
... This cancels the square root thus resulting in the latency condition ∆t 0 dt |A(t)| = const, the dominant component of the model proposed by Heil and Neubauer. The above considerations may also explain the apparent discrepancy between the latency measurements and the fact that psycho-acoustic studies successfully apply energy-integration models (Garner, 1947;Plomp and Bouman, 1959;Zwislocki, 1965;Florentine et al., 1988). Further experiments that compare spectral and temporal integration in different systems may shed light on this question. ...
Auditorische Transduktion beschreibt die Umwandlung von Schall in elektrische Signale in Rezeptorzellen. Dies geschieht durch eine Kette biophysikalischer Prozesse: mechanische Ankopplung der Schallwelle, Öffnung von mechanosensitiven Ionenkanälen in den Rezeptorzellen, Ansammlung des Membranpotentials und Auslösung von Aktionspotentialen. In dieser Arbeit wird die damit verbundene Signalverarbeitung am Beispiel der Rezeptorzellen im Ohr von Heuschrecken untersucht. Die Transduktion wird dazu als Kaskade einzelner funktioneller Module beschrieben. Es wird gezeigt, wie derartige Module aus der Beobachtung der System-Antwort, hier der Aktionspotentiale im auditorischen Nerv, mit Hilfe der Iso-Antwort-Methode charakterisiert werden können. Dabei werden im Experiment unterschiedliche akustische Reize ermittelt, die die gleiche System-Antwort liefern. In drei aufeinander aufbauenden experimentellen Untersuchungen führt dies zu folgenden Ergebnissen: 1) Für stationäre Signale wird die Feuerrate der Rezeptorzellen durch die Energie der Trommelfell-Schwingung reguliert. 2) Die auditorische Transduktion lässt sich durch eine Kaskade aus zwei linearen Filtern und zwei nicht-linearen Transformationen (LNLN-Kaskade) beschreiben. Die involvierten Prozesse agieren im sub-Millisekunden-Bereich und können mit der beschriebenen Methode - trotz der auf etwa eine Millisekunde beschränkten Präzision der Aktionspotentiale - mit einer Genauigkeit von ca. 10 Mikrosekunden vermessen werden. 3) Die Adaptation der Feuerrate enthält neben einem dominierenden rückgekoppelten Prozess, der durch die Feuerrate selbst gesteuert wird, auch eine Komponente, die direkt durch das Eingangssignal, die Schallintensität, ausgelöst wird und mechanischer Natur ist. Die Ergebnisse spiegeln die hohen Anforderungen an das zeitliche Auflösungsvermögen im Ohr wider. Die verwendete Methodik ist jedoch auch auf viele andere systemtheoretische Untersuchungen biophysikalischen Kaskaden anwendbar.
... It has been long established that below a critical duration, shorter sounds require a higher intensity than longer ones to be detected, or to be of equal loudness (Garner, 1947;Small et al., 1962;Watson and Gengel, 1969;Scharf, 1978;Gerken et al., 1990). This phenomenon has been generally referred to as temporal integration. ...
Many environmental sounds contain significant energy in the infrasonic and low-frequency (ISLF) ranges that have been associated with cases of annoyance and noise complaints. This study assessed the effect of sound duration on audibility and loudness of ISLF sounds. A first experiment evaluated detection thresholds for tones of 4, 16, and 32 Hz with durations up to 4000 ms. Furthermore, equal-loudness-level contours (ELCs) were obtained as function of duration up to 2000 ms. Tones of 1000 Hz were also included here. Results displayed the known pattern of general sound level decrease with increasing duration up to several hundred milliseconds. ELCs stabilized slightly earlier than thresholds, but after 1000 ms, levels remained roughly constant for both measures except for 4-Hz tones, where the decrease continued up to the longest durations tested. As 4-Hz cycles are perceptually resolved as separate pressure pulses, the authors hypothesized their duration dependence would resemble that of pulse trains. Hence, a second experiment evaluated pulse-train thresholds (1000-Hz carrier) for durations up to 4000 ms. For both pulse repetition rates of 4 and 32 Hz, threshold stabilized after 1000 ms as for tones ≥ 16 Hz, suggesting the continuing threshold decrease for a 4-Hz tone is specific to infrasound.
... The auditory threshold of detection decreases with increasing duration up to a stimulus length of approximately 1 s. This holds true for various types of stimuli over a broad frequency range [27]. Figure 4 shows data from Plomp and Bouman [83] and Florentine [24] for a stimulus frequency of 250 Hz. ...
In this paper, the psychophysical abilities and limitations of the auditory and vibrotactile modality will be discussed. A direct comparison reveals similarities and differences. The knowledge of those is the basis for the design of perceptually optimized auditory-tactile human–machine interfaces or multimodal music applications. Literature data and own results for psychophysical characteristics are summarized. An overview of the absolute perception thresholds of both modalities is given. The main factors which influence these thresholds are discussed: age, energy integration, masking and adaptation. Subsequently, the differential sensitivity (discrimination of intensity, frequency, temporal aspects and location) for suprathreshold signals is compared.
... Auditory temporal integration refers to the process by which the ear integrates the acoustic input over time. When the duration of a sound falls below a critical duration, the auditory system responds roughly to total energy, that is, to the product of intensity and time, rather than to sound intensity alone, as it does when duration exceeds the critical value (e.g., Algom & Babkoff, 1978Algom, Babkoff, & Ben Uriah, 1980;Algom, Palmon, & Cohen-Raz, 1989;Algom, Rubin, & Cohen-Raz, 1989;Garner, 1947;Zwislocki, 1960Zwislocki, , 1969. Although the rule of time-intensity trading varies as a function of sensation level (threshold vs. suprathreshold) and spectrum (tone vs. noise), nevertheless full integration for suprathreshold pure tones, like those used here, seems to hold up to about 200 ms (e.g., Algom & Marks, 1984;see also, Scharf, 1978;J. ...
How does context affect basic processes of sensory integration and the implicit psychophysical scales that underlie those processes? Five experiments examined how stimulus range and response regression determine characteristics of (a) psychophysical scales for loudness and (b) 3 kinds of intensity summation: binaural loudness summation, summation of loudness between tones widely spaced in frequency, and temporal loudness summation. Context affected the overt loudness scales in that smaller power-function exponents characterized larger versus smaller range of stimulation and characterized magnitude estimation versus magnitude production. More important, however, context simultaneously affected the degree of loudness integration as measured in terms of matching stimulus levels. Thus, stimulus range and scaling procedure influence not only overt response scales, but measures of underlying intensity processing.
... Investigation of the law relating change of threshold to period of stimulation suggests that it has a form similar to that found in the case of other sensory mechanisms'. This corresponds to the study results of human hearing abilities in air (Garner, 1947;Hamilton, 1957;Blodgett et al., 1958;Plomp & Bouman, 1959). Also a study on Bottlenose dolphin hearing under water (Johnson, 1968) shows that tonal transients with a duration shorter than the hearing integration time constant, must have a larger amplitude than that of sound signals of longer duration, in order to be detected. ...
It is known that human and mammalian hearing thresholds increase when the duration of a received sound signal falls below observer's hearing system time constant, a phenomenon for which Plomb & Bouman (1959) gave an exponential model of temporal integration. In the past, time constants have been determined for, for instance, humans, Bottlenose dolphins, Belugas and Harbour porpoises. Based on these studies, this paper reviews the data, calculates trend lines and concludes that Bottlenose dolphin/Beluga and Harbour porpoise time constants are roughly similar to those of humans.
... Psychoacoustic experiments on humans have indicated that detection thresholds depend on energy integration, suggesting that the auditory system has an intensity threshold; these findings have been traditionally described by leaky integrator models (e.g., Garner 1947;Plomp and Bouman 1959;Zwislocki 1960). More recent studies suggested that the detection threshold of sounds in vertebrate ears, cortical neurons and on the perceptual level is based on sound pressure integration, rather than energy integration (Heil and Neubauer, 2001). ...
Die zeitliche Filterung von sensorischem Input ist entscheidend für das Erkennen vieler Stimuli. Auditorische Neurone führen dazu mehrere Verarbeitungsschritte und Signaltransformationen durch, u.a. durch zeitliche Integration, zeitliche Auflösung und Selektion eines zeitlichen Merkmals. Um zu testen ob zeitliche Filterung von Stimuluseigenschaften (Intensität) oder Kontext (Temperatur) abhängt untersuchte ich Neurone in der Hörbahn der Wanderheuschrecke. Zuerst untersuchte ich zeitliche Integration in Rezeptoren und Interneuronen. Zeitverlauf und Ausmaß der Integration waren Neuronen-spezifisch. Während periphere Neurone die akustische Energie integrierten, unterschied sich die zeitliche Integration der Interneuronentypen stark, was eine spezifische zeitliche Filterung ermöglicht. Die Analyse postsynaptischer Potentiale deckte presynaptische und intrinsische Mechanismen der Integration auf, was darauf hindeutet, dass Unterschiede zwischen Neuronen wahrscheinlich auf Typ-spezifischer Verarbeitung beruhen. Zweitens erforschte ich die neuronale Antwort auf den zweiten Stimulus in einem Stimuluspaar mit einem Interstimulus-Intervall von wenigen Millisekunden. Die Veränderung der Antwort auf den zweiten im Vergleich zum ersten Stimulus zeigt den Effekt von akuter, kurzfristiger Adaptation und ist ein Maß für die maximale zeitliche Auflösung. In der sensorischen Peripherie trat moderate Adaptation auf, deren Einfluss exponentiell abfiel. Viele Interneurone zeigten dagegen nicht-lineare Effekte, wie die Unterdrückung oder Verstärkung der Antwort auf den zweiten Stimulus. Drittens testete ich den Effekt von Temperatur auf zeitliche Filterung. Die Selektivität von Interneuronen für zeitliche Stimulusmerkmale wurde bei wechselnden Temperaturen untersucht. Mit steigender Temperatur präferierten Neurone ein zeitlich komprimiertes Merkmal. Diese temperaturabhängige Veränderung könnte zur Temperatur-Kopplung von Sender und Empfänger bei den wechselwarmen Heuschrecken beitragen.
... Brief trains of low-intensity electrical stimulation of hypothalamic and septal sites have readily discernible sensory properties: rats can be trained to indicate the presence or absence of such signals, and their accuracy of detection increases as the 'number of pulses or intensity of pulses in the signal is increased (Bass, 1974). The functional relations between accuracy of detection and signal intensity, and the partial temporal summation of intensity and number of pulses, is similar to results obtained with such exteroceptive stimuli as vision (Long, 1951) and audition (Garner, 1947) as well as those frequently observed for electrical stimulation of singleneuron preparations (e.g., Woodbury, 1965) or subcortical sensory nuclei (Gerken, 1970). ...
The effects of intensity of signal and intensity of reinforcer on “yes/no” discrimination behavior were studied using electrical brain stimulation of one site for the signal and of another, contralateral site for the reinforcer. Accuracy declined as signal intensity declined, whereas accuracy was greatest with middle values of reinforcers. There was no statistical interaction between intensity of signal and intensity of reinforcer, indicating that processing of the aftereffects of the signals was not differentially influenced by intensity of reinforcers. Analysis of the detection behavior suggests that reinforcer level influenced decision criteria rather than sensitivity to the signal.
... The assumption that the CB integrates energy over its bandwidth, although not a strict necessity for the prediction, appears to be parsimonious in view of Fletcher's (1940) original conception, In addition, there are supporting data for such an integration hypothesis (Garner, 1947;Gässler, 1954;Green, Birdsall, & Tanner, 1957;Plomp & Bouman, 1959;Sheeley & Bilger, 1964). ...
The objective of the study was to examine the performance of two groups of Ss on an auditory frequency analysis task. The groups were differentiated in terms of musical training and background. Predictions based on the assumption that frequency analysis is dependent upon the critical band were derived from two synthetically produced inharmonic complex stimuli. Results indicate that nonmusicians are inferior to professional musicians in their ability to analyze complex waveforms. The results suggest that musicians possess critical bands which are rectangular in shape and approximately 20% narrower in width than published values.
Thresholds for detecting sounds in quiet decrease with increasing sound duration in every species studied. The neural mechanisms underlying this trade-off, often referred to as temporal integration, are not fully understood. Here, we probe the human auditory system with a large set of tone stimuli differing in duration, shape of the temporal amplitude envelope, duration of silent gaps between bursts, and frequency. Duration was varied by varying the plateau duration of plateau-burst (PB) stimuli, the duration of the onsets and offsets of onset-offset (OO) stimuli, and the number of identical bursts of multiple-burst (MB) stimuli. Absolute thresholds for a large number of ears (>230) were measured using a 3-interval-3-alternative forced choice (3I-3AFC) procedure. Thresholds decreased with increasing sound duration in a manner that depended on the temporal envelope. Most commonly, thresholds for MB stimuli were highest followed by thresholds for OO and PB stimuli of corresponding durations. Differences in the thresholds for MB and OO stimuli and in the thresholds for MB and PB stimuli, however, varied widely across ears, were negative in some ears, and were tightly correlated. We show that the variation and correlation of MB-OO and MB-PB threshold differences are linked to threshold microstructure, which affects the relative detectability of the sidebands of the MB stimuli and affects estimates of the bandwidth of auditory filters. We also found that thresholds for MB stimuli increased with increasing duration of the silent gaps between bursts. We propose a new model and show that it accurately accounts for our results and does so considerably better than a leaky-integrator-of-intensity model and a probabilistic model proposed by others. Our model is based on the assumption that sensory events are generated by a Poisson point process with a low rate in the absence of stimulation and higher, time-varying rates in the presence of stimulation. A subject in a 3I-3AFC task is assumed to choose the interval in which the greatest number of events occurred or randomly chooses among intervals which are tied for the greatest number of events. The subject is further assumed to count events over the duration of an evaluation interval that has the same timing and duration as the expected stimulus. The increase in the rate of the events caused by stimulation is proportional to the time-varying amplitude envelope of the bandpass-filtered signal raised to an exponent. We find the exponent to be ∼3, consistent with our previous studies. This challenges models that are based on the assumption of the integration of a neural response that is directly proportional to the stimulus amplitude or proportional to its square (i.e., proportional to the stimulus intensity or power).
The American Psychological Foundation (APF) Gold Medal Awards recognize distinguished and enduring records of accomplishments in 4 areas of psychology. The 1999 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology is Wendell R. Garner. Garner is known for his work in psychophysics, discrimination, perception, and information processing. A citation, biography, and selected bibliography of Garner's work are presented.
The American Psychological Foundation (APF) Gold Medal Awards recognize distinguished and enduring records of accomplishments in 4 areas of psychology. The 1999 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology is Wendell R. Garner. Joseph D. Matarazzo, President of the APF, will present the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology at the 107th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. Garner's body of work spans six decades and has a continuing influence on the field of psychology. His seminal studies on psychophysics, discrimination, perception, and information processing helped define such concepts as channel capacity and ultimately helped trigger the cognitive revolution. His book, Uncertainty and Structure as Psychological Concepts (1962) helped extend information theory into psychology. While his book, The Processing of Information and Structure (1974), helped introduce and integrate several experimental approaches to the central questions of pattern perception and dimensional interaction. Among his other contributions is the concept of converging operations.
In recent years the optimisation of sound quality has become essential to the design of new consumer products, particularly in the sports equipment industry where manufacturers have become limited in the performance enhancements they can make to products and differentiate themselves from competitors. This is a result of more stringent regulations being imposed by governing bodies to preserve the ‘nature of the game’ and the importance of physical endeavour rather than the technological enhancement of equipment.
Previous studies have sought to determine which attributes of impact sounds produced by sports equipment contribute most to players’ perceptions of ‘feel’ and product sound quality. However, there has been no study that compares the different methods for conducting these studies and determines which is the most appropriate. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the various methods of collecting both objective and subjective data, in order to better understand how impact sounds in golf are perceived and how that contributes to players’ perceptions of overall product quality. The potential benefits of this study could be to provide sports equipment manufacturers with a guide to performing effective product sound quality studies when designing new products.
In the present study, a sound level meter and binaural headset were compared against a binaural head, considered the gold standard in sound objective measurement, in terms of their frequency response and in their ability to capture golf impact sounds representative of how a human ear would hear them. Subjective ratings of impact sounds were also collected using scaled response methods in three different environments; an outdoor (covered) driving range, an indoor anechoic chamber and during a delayed jury evaluation procedure, which took place in a controlled laboratory environment.
Statistical techniques were then employed to evaluate the differences between these data collection methods. Measurements taken with the alternative systems tended to differ systematically from those taken with the gold standard, but not to an extent that was statistically significant, making them all viable options depending on available resources. Also, it was found that subjective ratings given during jury evaluation enabled differences in impact sounds to be perceived more accurately than in real-time; but players’ perceptions of overall sound quality were noticeably affected using this method, due most likely to the lack of tactile and visual sensations that are present in real-time. Further studies need to be carried out to determine whether; the use of different psychoacoustic methods produce differences in the perception of sound quality and exactly which sensory system contributes most to the perception of overall product quality.
This paper examines the relation between transcriptions of intonation and information about variation in fundamental frequency obtained from spectrograms. It suggests the necessity for quantizing the latter with respect to time and frequency, having regard to the values for differential thresholds obtained by psychophysical methods and sets out in a preliminary form a procedure for evaluating intonation curves by comparing them with graphs representing suitably quantized physical information. The results of such a comparison for a number of transcriptions made by students of phonetics are presented.
Hatten wir bisher den Weg der informationstragenden Signale ausschließlich im Bereich der physikalischen Übertragungsmedien verfolgt, so wollen wir nun das Schicksal der Signale beim empfangsseitigen Kommunikationspartner, dem Perzipienten, betrachten, d. h. im psychophysiologischen Bereich.
The present work aims at producing a test, similar to a speech intelligibility test, which can be used to rate the acoustic quality of rooms for music. Listeners' perceptions of the duration of sounds were investigated in an attempt to find a useful indicator of the acoustics of a room for music and speech. The research design was based on a discrimination task and a 2AFC experimental procedure. Two experiments were carried out in which two acoustic variables, reverberation time and background noise level, were varied and listeners' smallest perceivable sound duration changes were measured. It was found that the listeners' duration perceptions were significantly influenced by the reverberation time and background noise level of the listening environment, and that these discrimination procedures may form the basis for room acoustics assessments.
In audition, perhaps more than in any other sense, the temporal aspects of the stimulus are crucially important for conveying information. This clearly is true of speech and of most auditory communication signals, where the temporal pattern of spectral changes is, essentially, the informational substrate. Indeed, an auditory “pattern” is seldom a fixed spectral shape; rather, it is a time varying sequence of spectral shapes. Given the fundamental importance of temporal changes in audition, it is not surprising that most auditory systems are “fast,” at least compared to other sensory systems. We can hear temporal changes in the low millisecond range. We can, for example, hear the roughness produced by periodically interrupting a broadband noise at interruption rates up to several kHz. This is several orders of magnitude faster than in vision where the analogous “flicker fusion frequency” is a sluggish 50 to 60 Hz.
Masked thresholds for constant and gliding tones were determined by the method of adjustment for durations between 0.5 and 5000 ms in three overlapping frequency regions between 0.25 and 3.3 kHz. The masker was a continuous white noise at 70-dB SPL. Listening was monaural;subjects had normal hearing. Below 10 ms the thresholds for upward glides were lower and those for downward glides higher than the thresholds for constant tones. In the 10-300-ms duration range, which encompasses formant transitions of speech, the highest thresholds are for downward glides and the lowest ones for constant tones. These differences could result from different time courses of neural decay and inhibition for constant tones, upward and downward glides. The differences between upward and downward glides indicate that the phase spectra influence sound detectability. The thresholds for constant tones reach minimum around 1 s. The thresholds for glides continue to decrease at least up to 5 s. The 'critical' duration for constant tone integration can result from the overriding of integration effects by adaptation effects, the latter ones being eliminated by changing frequency. The curves for constant-tone threshold between 10- and 1000-ms duration were fitted by a product of exponential and hyperbolic functions.
Der Bau des menschlichen Ohres ist nicht nur vom physikalischen, sondern auch vom technischen Standpunkt außerordentlich lehrreich. Die Natur hat hier einen Apparat geschaffen, der an Leistungsfähigkeit und Zweckmäßigkeit unsere modernsten technischen Einrichtungen übertrifft und immer wieder wertvolle Hinweise für Entwicklungsarbeiten liefert.
Temporal integration in the auditory system of locusts was quantified by presenting single clicks and click pairs while performing intracellular recordings. Auditory neurons were studied at three processing stages, which form a feed-forward network in the metathoracic ganglion. Receptor neurons and most first-order interneurons ("local neurons") encode the signal envelope, while second-order interneurons ("ascending neurons") tend to extract more complex, behaviorally relevant sound features. In different neuron types of the auditory pathway we found three response types: no significant temporal integration (some ascending neurons), leaky energy integration (receptor neurons and some local neurons), and facilitatory processes (some local and ascending neurons). The receptor neurons integrated input over very short time windows (<2 ms). Temporal integration on longer time scales was found at subsequent processing stages, indicative of within-neuron computations and network activity. These different strategies, realized at separate processing stages and in parallel neuronal pathways within one processing stage, could enable the grasshopper's auditory system to evaluate longer time windows and thus to implement temporal filters, while at the same time maintaining a high temporal resolution.
Copyright © 2014, Journal of Neurophysiology.
This is a defense of the existing system of notation in organbuilding.
This research investigated the effect of aging on sensory information processing and decision-making. Detection thresholds in quiet and in noise and temporal acuity, and their associated choice reaction times were measured in two groups of normal-hearing subjects, differing in age. All three psychophysical tasks utilized a four-interval forced-choice procedure. The results indicated that there were no differences in duration discrimination or choice reaction time as a function of aging. However, the variability in choice reaction times was significantly greater for the older group, signifying greater heterogeneity in the time for decision-making. Erroneous responses generally took longer to make than correct responses. For the younger group, the erroneous response time increased with task complexity.
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