Search results for "loudness"
showing 10 items of 48 documents
Acceptance of Tinnitus: Validation of the Tinnitus Acceptance Questionnaire
2013
The concept of acceptance has recently received growing attention within tinnitus research due to the fact that tinnitus acceptance is one of the major targets of psychotherapeutic treatments. Accordingly, acceptance-based treatments will most likely be increasingly offered to tinnitus patients and assessments of acceptance-related behaviours will thus be needed. The current study investigated the factorial structure of the Tinnitus Acceptance Questionnaire (TAQ) and the role of tinnitus acceptance as mediating link between sound perception (i.e. subjective loudness of tinnitus) and tinnitus distress. In total, 424 patients with chronic tinnitus completed the TAQ and validated measures of t…
Temporal weights in the perception of sound intensity: Effects of sound duration and number of temporal segments
2018
Loudness is a fundamental aspect of auditory perception that is closely related to the physical level of the sound. However, it has been demonstrated that, in contrast to a sound level meter, human listeners do not weight all temporal segments of a sound equally. Instead, the beginning of a sound is more important for loudness estimation than later temporal portions. The present study investigates the mechanism underlying this primacy effect by varying the number of equal-duration temporal segments (5 and 20) and the total duration of the sound (1.0 to 10.0 s) in a factorial design. Pronounced primacy effects were observed for all 20-segment sounds. The temporal weights for the five-segment…
Auditory distance perception in an acoustic pipe
2008
In a study of auditory distance perception, we investigated the effects of exaggeration the acoustic cue of reverberation where the intensity of sound did not vary noticeably. The set of stimuli was obtained by moving a sound source inside a 10.2-m long pipe having a 0.3-m diameter. Twelve subjects were asked to listen to a speech sound while keeping their head inside the pipe and then to estimate the egocentric distance from the sound source using a magnitude production procedure. The procedure was repeated eighteen times using six different positions of the sound source. Results show that the point at which perceived distance equals physical distance is located approximately 3.5 m away fr…
Why Do Forward Maskers Affect Auditory Intensity Discrimination? Evidence from "Molecular Psychophysics"
2014
Nonsimultaneous maskers can strongly impair performance in an auditory intensity discrimination task. Using methods of molecular psychophysics, we quantified the extent to which (1) a masker-induced impairment of the representation of target intensity (i.e., increase in internal noise) and (2) a systematic influence of the masker intensities on the decision variable contribute to these effects. In a two-interval intensity discrimination procedure, targets were presented in quiet, and combined with forward maskers. The lateralization of the maskers relative to the targets was varied via the interaural time difference. Intensity difference limens (DLs) were strongly elevated under forward mas…
The Louder, the Longer: Object Length Perception Is Influenced by Loudness, but Not by Pitch
2019
Sound by itself can be a reliable source of information about an object&rsquo
Temporal weights in loudness: Investigation of the effects of background noise and sound level
2019
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…
Psychoacoustic Annoyance Implementation With Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks for Monitoring in Smart Cities
2020
Soundscape standard (ISO 12913) is mainly oriented to describe the psychoacoustic annoyance (PA) due to the perceived sound in different environments. The evaluation of this annoyance is commonly based on the Zwicker and Fastl model that defines several components related to this subjective annoyance, such as loudness, sharpness, roughness, and fluctuation strength. But due to their complexity, these components are difficult to be calculated on small board computers (SBCs) in real time in order to enable a wireless acoustic sensor network for PA monitoring. In this article, we describe the necessary procedures to implement the complete psychoacoustic model by Zwicker and Fastl in a precise …
Changes in Speech Range Profile Are Associated with Cognitive Impairment
2021
Background and Purpose The aim of this study was to describe the variations in the speech range profile (SRP) of patients affected by cognitive decline. Methods We collected the data of patients managed for suspected voice and speech disorders, and suspected cognitive impairment. Patients underwent an Ear Nose and Throat evaluation and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). To obtain SRP, we asked the patients to read 18 sentences twice, at their most comfortable pitch and loudness as they would do in daily conversation, and recorded their voice on to computer software. Results The study included 61 patients. The relationship between the MMSE score and SRP parameters was established. Increas…
Temporal loudness weights in background noise: Data and models
2019
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…
DPOAE‐Grams in Patients with Acute Tonal Tinnitus
2005
To investigate cochlear outer hair cell function in patients with acute tonal tinnitus and normal or near-normal hearing threshold.Prospective controlled study in an academic tertiary health center. Distortion products of otoacoustic emissions (DPOAE)-grams of 32 ears with acute tonal tinnitus and normal hearing or minimal hearing loss were compared with those of 17 healthy nontinnitus ears.Tinnitus ears exhibited relatively increased amplitudes of DPOAE at high frequencies (4-6.3 kHz) when compared with the group of healthy ears and relatively decreased DPOAE amplitudes at middle frequencies (1650-2400 Hz). Statistically significant ( P0.01) increased mean values of DPOAE amplitudes were o…