Hearing Threshold for Periodic Tone Pulses
Reinier Plomp · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1961
In continuation of a previous paper, the relation between threshold, repetition time, and duration for periodically repeated tone pulses is treated. Experimental data at test frequencies of 250, 1000, and 4000 cps appeared to agree very well with a derived relation based on the following assumptions: Switching on a sinusoidal signal of intensity I results in an effect s somewhere in the hearing pathway, that approaches its final value asymptotically according to an exponential function; switching off this signal gives a decay of s also according to an exponential function; perception occurs when s exceeds a critical value s0. For the time constants of the growth and decay of s the same value could be chosen, being in agreement with the corresponding value for single tone pulses (0.2–0.3 sec). For very short repetition times, the data deviate from the predicted curves, which is explained by the assumption that energy integration is restricted to a fixed bandwidth. These critical bandwidths determined for the periodic tone pulses are also in harmony with the results for single pulses.