Lecture-Oct11-d

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

8:31 AM

Psychoacoustics

Using listening experiments to understand the relationship between

perceived sensation and the physical features of a stimulus
Sensations:
loudness (includes masking), pitch, roughness, fusion
Ideally, the physiology should explain psychoacoustical observations

Auditory cortex: perception, cognition

Extraction of features from the temporal and spatial pattern of neural activity such as:
pitch, loudness, timbre, other cues
loudness
 total neural activity caused by the sound
timbre
 spatial distribution pattern of neural activity
pitch
 position of local peaks in the spatial distribution

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Lecture-Oct14-a
Wednes day, October 13, 2010
8:38 AM

Loudness perception
Absolute thresholds and equal loudness contours

<= Measured via listening experiments

Tones of equal SPL but different frequencies
do not sound equally loud.
The bandpass effect is attributed to the
transfer function of the outer-middle ear
and to a drop in the number of hair cells
towards the extremes of the BM.
For a sound to be perceived as twice as loud
(unit: sone), its intensity must be increased
by a factor of 10.
Loudness sensation comes from total neural
activity which is a nonlinear function of
stimulus intensity (see intensity coding by nerve
fiber).
Screen clipping taken: 10/13/2010, 9:52 AM

Growth of loudness is different for different

frequencies.

Stevens law
L (sone) = k x Ip
p=0.3
k depends on frequency

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Computational model of hearing

Outputs of the computational model for a tone stimulus

Screen clipping taken: 10/13/2010, 8:43 PM

Loudness summation

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Lecture-Oct14-b
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
8:23 PM

an auditory phenomenon in which the presence of one sound

Masking:
raises the hearing threshold for another sound in its frequency or time vicinity.

Simultaneous Masking

Masking threshold
depends on
SPL & frequency & nature
of Masker
nature of the maskee

Based on our study of physiology, simultaneous masking is explained by

our limited ability to distinguish small changes in the BM excitation pattern
produced by a sound.
For instance A target will be masked if its addition to the masker does not change
the level at the output of any auditory filter by more than 1 dB.

Excitation pattern: two sine tones

Screen clipping taken: 10/13/2010, 9:56 AM

D = (0.25)*I

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Band-narrowing experiment of Fletcher

Audibility of a tone in the

presence of a noise masker

Screen clipping taken: 10/13/2010, 9:57 AM

Temporal Masking

Screen clipping taken: 10/13/2010, 9:54 AM

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Apply a narrow band of noise. Then apply a tone in

the centre of noise band. The threshold amplitude
for the audibility of the tone keeps increasing with
the noise bw until critical bw is reached.

Frequency perception: 1. Discriminating pure tones.

JND for pitch of pure tones is ~2 Hz up to 1 kHz. After this, it is about 1-2% of the
frequency.

Frequency perception: 2. Superposition of 2 tones

Increasing separation slowly leads to a transition from beats/roughness to perception of 2

separate tones when the excitation regions on the BM are separated sufficiently.
Note: if the 2 tones are fed separately to the two ears, there is no beats/roughness! (no
overlap on BM)

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Lecture-Oct14-c
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
8:48 PM

Speech Perception
Speech, as we know, can be represented as acoustic patterns that vary
in frequency, intensity and time.
But, we now see that neither the wideband nor narrowband
spectrogram provide suitable perceptual representations..

The spectrogram displays the time-frequency components according to

their physical intensity levels while the human ear's sensitivity to the
different components is actually influenced by several auditory
phenomena:
the widely differing sensitivities of hearing in the low, mid and high
frequency regions in terms of the threshold of audibility
the decreasing frequency resolution, with increasing frequency, across
the audible range
the nonlinear scaling of the perceived loudness with the physically
measured signal intensity
auditory masking by which strong signal components suppress the
audibility of relatively weak signal components in their t-f vicinity

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