Psychoacoustics

Article

Psychoacoustics studies the relationship between physical sound and auditory perception. It investigates how listeners experience pitch, loudness, timbre, localisation, rhythm, masking, consonance, and other qualities.

Human hearing does not reproduce acoustic measurements directly. Sensitivity varies with frequency and level, and perception depends on context, attention, expectation, duration, and interactions among components.

Important topics include auditory thresholds, critical bands, equal-loudness contours, temporal resolution, binaural cues, missing fundamentals, combination tones, and the masking of one sound by another.

Psychoacoustic research is used in audio coding, music production, hearing aids, room design, product sound, telecommunications, alarms, and noise regulation. Perceptual audio formats reduce data partly by discarding components that are unlikely to be heard.

Source details and credits

• Source / publisher: Wikipedia
• URL type: WWW
• Credits: Wikipedia
• URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics