Loudness and ABR findings with short signals: More compression than expected?
Birger Kollmeier, Jesko Lars Verhey, Oliver Wegner, Torsten Dau · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1999
Previous work on loudness perception was primarily focused on stationary stimuli. However, knowledge about the processing and perception of temporally varying sounds is of special interest for various applications, such as, e.g., speech perception and hearing aids. We therefore studied the loudness of brief sounds both with psychophysical and electrophysiological methods (i.e., auditory evoked potentials) as a function of the stimulus bandwidth. The loudness summation effect appeared to be larger for brief stimuli than for long stimuli. Also, the magnitude of wave V in ABR recordings for brief stimuli with equal subjective loudness was found to depend on the stimulus bandwidth. Both results indicate that the effective compression for short signals is larger than for long signals. This finding is in conflict with predictions derived with current loudness models or with a model of the effective processing in the auditory system. The consequences of these findings for the nonlinear compression stage in auditory models will be discussed.