The Measurement of Human Channel Transmission Characteristics
W. A. Munson, J. E. Karlin · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1954
This paper uses concepts in information theory and psychophysics to provide a basis for the quantitative measurement of certain communication properties of the human being. The responses of an observer in a threshold of hearing test were found to be similar to the transmission of a noise and a noise plus a signal over a physical circuit having a bistable element with a variable operating point. With this analogy, the results of threshold tests are used to compute the noise level of human circuits and the operating points of the hypothetical bistable mechanisms in human channels. The noise level is the practical lower limit for the transmission of information. The operating point usually changes systematically with signal level. For many observers it decreases as the signal level is lowered but again increases when the signal approaches the noise level.