Perception of changes in loudness

Abstract

Neuhoff replies — Canévet and his colleagues suggest that their findings address dynamic loudness change and are inconsistent with my recent discovery of a bias for rising intensity tones¹. However, the two sets of experiments address fundamentally different questions. Canévet et al. 's listeners were asked to make judgements about loudness, whereas my listeners were asked to make judgements about the amount of dynamic change. Essentially, their listeners answered the question “How loud is it now?” by assigning a number to the loudness of a changing intensity sound at various times throughout the stimulus duration. This provided a discrete measure of loudness at various snapshots in time. Listeners in my experiments were specifically asked to ignore the overall loudness of the sounds and to make summary judgements about the amount of loudness change, essentially answering the question “How much did it change in loudness?”.