Introduction

In this lab, you will learn some basic concepts associated with psychoacoustics, and perform a lab activity to help demonstrate these ideas. Psychoacoustics is the science of human hearing, with particular attention to the physical principles associated with the organs and tissue used for human hearing, or audition. An average human listener can perceive pure tones with frequencies as low as 20 Hz, or as high as 20 kHz (a factor of 1000 different!). The range of loudness levels (more on this to come) that the average human can perceive is even larger: the ratio in pressure between the loudest sound comfortably perceptible, and the quietest perceptible sound is approximately $10^{10}$!

In particular, your activity for this lab will be to learn more and experiment with a computer model of loudness. This model will allow you to accurately predict from a recorded sound what its average loudness will be. You will also learn how loudness changes over time as a sound changes over time. Ideally, this lab should follow completion of the monochord laboratory assignment, so that you can compute loudness estimates on your own recorded string sounds.