Measurement of Tonal Density
S. S. Stevens, Miguelina Guirao · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1963
Recent success in the scaling of tonal volume [H. S. Terrace and S. S. Stevens, Am. J. Psychol. 75, 596–605 (1962)] has led to an attempt to determine how tonal density depends on frequency and sound pressure. Density refers to the apparent “compactness,” “concentration,” or “hardness” of a tone. Loud, high-pitched tones have high density; soft, low-pitched tones have low density. Thus, density increases with both frequency and sound pressure. An attempt was made to determine directly the form of the density surface by asking observers to assign to a series of tones numbers proportional to the subjective density. From these magnitude estimations, the forms of the equal-density contours were estimated. These equal-density contours were later checked by a direct-matching procedure.