On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:57:41PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: > 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.
Absolutely true. Extrapolating a bit, that is one of the reasons why an unamplified singer in an opera theatre can have a dramatic effect that is much stronger than someone yelling into a microphone and being amplified to 130 dB SPL. By which I don't want to imply that amplified music is wrong in any sense. Ciao, -- FA There are three of them, and Alleline. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
