Abstract
Abstract What sound quality has led to exclude infrasound from sound in the conventional hearing range? We examined whether temporal segregation of pressure pulses is a distinctive property and evaluated this perceptual limit via an adaptive psychophysical procedure for pure tones and carriers of different envelopes. Further, to examine across-domain similarity and individual covariation of this limit, here called the critical segregation rate (CSR), it was also measured for various periodic visual and vibrotactile stimuli. Results showed that sequential auditory or vibrotactile stimuli separated by at least ~80‒90 ms (~11‒12-Hz repetition rates), will be perceived as perceptually segregated from one another. While this limit did not statistically differ between these two modalities, it was significantly lower than the ~150 ms necessary to perceptually segregate successive visual stimuli. For the three sensory modalities, stimulus periodicity was the main factor determining the CSR, which apparently reflects neural recovery times of the different sensory systems. Among all experimental conditions, significant within- and across-modality individual CSR correlations were observed, despite the visual CSR (mean: 6.8 Hz) being significantly lower than that of both other modalities. The auditory CSR was found to be significantly lower than the frequency above which sinusoids start to elicit a tonal quality (19 Hz; recently published for the same subjects). Returning to our initial question, the latter suggests that the cessation of tonal quality — not the segregation of pressure fluctuations — is the perceptual quality that has led to exclude infrasound (sound with frequencies < 20 Hz) from the conventional hearing range.
Highlights
Humans are able to hear sounds with frequencies well down to a few Hertz, the frequency range of hearing is often — misleadingly — reported to span 20 Hz‒20 kHz
The critical segregation rate (CSR)), averaged across all runs and subjects. They show that the range in which subjects varied the stimulus frequency around the CSR in the procedure was small compared to the inter-subject variability in CSR
While no significant difference between the auditory and vibrotactile CSRs was found from post-hoc multiple comparisons (Hochberg & Tamhane, 1987), the same analysis indicated CSRs were significantly lower for vision than for the two other modalities
Summary
Humans are able to hear sounds with frequencies well down to a few Hertz, the frequency range of hearing is often — misleadingly — reported to span 20 Hz‒20 kHz (for a review, see Møller & Pedersen, 2004). Infrasound has become a useful label, it is not quite clear what perceptual sound quality or combination of them has led to exclude it from the conventional hearing range. Reports have described infrasound as having a ‘discontinuous’ perceptual quality (Jurado et al, 2020; Møller & Pedersen, 2004). This notion of perceptual segregation at low repetition rates is shared among different sensory modalities. With the initial aim of identifying whether perceptual discontinuity is a key quality that sets infrasound apart from the conventional hearing range, we determined the upper cutoff frequency of this perceptual quality for a group of subjects using pure tones, and compared it to that for amplitude-modulated auditory stimuli. We determined this frequency limit for various visual and vibrotactile stimuli, to examine its crossmodal similarity as well as across-domain individual correlations
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