Continuous Loudness Judgments of Dynamics in Recorded Music Excerpts

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate loudness judgments of musician and nonmu-sician listeners in response to performed dynamic changes within a musical context. Ten previously recorded music excerpts selected from diverse examples of music served as stimuli. Subjects listened individually and responded continuously during music examples using the Continuous Response Digital Interface (CRDI) to indicate perceived loudness levels. A three-way analysis of variance revealed that musician subjects indicated a significantly smaller magnitude of dynamic change than did nonmusician subjects. Crescendos were judged as having a significantly greater magnitude of change than decrescendos. There were also differences between the individual excerpts. The obtained relationships between the subjective magnitude of loudness change and the physical magnitude of intensity change were compared to those found in the psychoa-coustical literature. Music stimuli in context were perceived somewhat differently than were the pure tone and noise-band stimuli of previous research.