Loudness, Reciprocality, and Partition Scales
S. S. Stevens, Miguelina Guirao · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1962
By the methods of magnitude estimation and magnitude production, judgments of softness were shown to be the reciprocal of judgments of loudness. The instruction to judge “distance” produces the same results as instructions to judge softness. Attempts to partition a segment of the loudness continuum into equal-appearing intervals results in a systematic error that is greater the more variable are the judgments.