On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Philipp Überbacher <[email protected]> wrote:
> We may be comparing the wrong thing when we compare with the size of > objects to loudness. > It's relatively easy to say that the interval between sound B and C > is twice as long as the interval between A and B (given the > interval and the length of the sound is in a certain range). This is > probably closer to the object size comparison. > I wonder how well we can judge something like twice the > brightness. one little side problem with this is that our sensitivity to both loudness and brightness is adaptive. this means that although one could do some experimental work to determine the ratios that lead most people to judge one sound 2x as loud as another, as soon as you leave the experimental context, it becomes pretty meaningless in any practical sense. what you judge as quiet or loud (or bright or dim) depends an awful lot on what you've just been listening to. given that our sensitivity to volume is non-linear, it only takes some pre-exposure to a very quiet or very loud environment to totally skew the part of the curve that we're on when we try to establish how loud something is. to be clear, i'm not suggesting that its not possible to come up with some useful and interesting numbers by measuring this sort of thing. i just want to note that they have to be viewed as deeply fuzzy because of the effect of the pre-listening environment in setting sensitivity levels. --p _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
