The Loudness and Monaural Loudness Matching of Short Tones
Wendell R. Garner · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1948
Differential sensitivity to the intensity of tones as a function of tone duration can be studied in a variety of ways. In these experiments a monaural loudness-matching technique was used, and the standard deviation (SD) in db of the matching scores was used as the measure of precision. With one technique a standard tone of 500 msec. duration was followed by a tone of variable duration (10–500 msec.) after a silent interval of 50, 100, or 500 msec. In another technique, both standard and comparison tones were of the same duration (10–500 msec.) with the same silent periods between tones. (1) When the standard tone was always 500 msec., the SD of the loudness matches increased with a decrease in the duration of the comparison tone from approximately 1 to 3 db, and the length of the silent interval had no effect on the function. (2) When both standard and comparison tones were of the same duration, the SD again increased as the duration was decreased; in this case, however, a silent interval of 50 msec. caused an increase from approximately 1 to 4 db while a silent interval of 500 msec. caused an increase of approximately 1 to 1.5 db throughout the range of durations employed. (3) When a standard tone of a constant duration is used to obtain loudness matchings, a measure of the loudness of tones as a function of duration is also obtained. These measures showed a clear distinction between the 6 observers used. For 3 observers, the change in duration caused practically no change in loudness. For the other 3 observers, changes in loudness level as great as 9 db were recorded. It appears that some observers make a loudness match of this sort in terms of intensity, while others tend to match in terms of total energy.