0000000000285987
AUTHOR
Alexander Fischenich
Temporal weights in loudness: Investigation of the effects of background noise and sound level
Previous research has consistently shown that for sounds varying in intensity over time, the beginning of the sound is of higher importance for the perception of loudness than later parts (primacy effect). However, in all previous studies, the target sounds were presented in quiet, and at a fixed average sound level. In the present study, temporal loudness weights for a time-varying narrowband noise were investigated in the presence of a continuous bandpass-filtered background noise and the average sound levels of the target stimuli were varied across a range of 60 dB. Pronounced primacy effects were observed in all conditions and there were no significant differences between the temporal w…
Temporal loudness weights in background noise: Data and models
Previous studies consistently showed that human listeners primarily consider the beginning of a time-varying sound when judging its overall loudness, and place less weight on subsequent temporal portions. However, all experiments studying this primacy effect in temporal loudness weights presented the target sound in quiet. Here, we compared temporal weights when the target sound was either presented in quiet or in a continuous background noise, and for a variation in the level of the target sound across a range of 60 dB. The target sound was a time-varying narrowband noise, the background noise was a continuous bandpass-filtered noise. In all conditions, we observed the expected primacy eff…
The effect of silent gaps on temporal weights in loudness judgments
Abstract Human loudness judgments of time-varying sounds show a non-uniform temporal weighting pattern with increased weights at the beginning of a sound. Four experiments were conducted to investigate whether this primacy effect reoccurs after a silent gap of an appropriate duration that is inserted into a level-fluctuating sound. In three of the experiments, contiguous sounds as well as sounds containing silent gaps of different durations were presented. The temporal loudness weights were compared between the sounds that contained a gap and the sounds without a gap. The data showed that with increasing gap duration an increasingly pronounced primacy effect reoccurred on the second sound p…
Temporal loudness weights are frequency specific
Previous work showed that the beginning of a sound is more important for the perception of loudness than later parts. When a short silent gap of sufficient duration is inserted into a sound, this primacy effect reoccurs in the second sound part after the gap. The present study investigates whether this temporal weighting occurs independently for different frequency bands. Sounds consisting of two bandpass noises were presented in four different conditions: (1) a simultaneous gap in both bands, (2) a gap in only the lower frequency band, (3) a gap in only the higher frequency band, or (4) no gap. In all conditions, the temporal loudness weights showed a primacy effect at sound onset. For the…