David Green and the auditory demonstration tapes

Abstract

In 1976, Dave Green received a grant from the National Science Foundation to create a series of auditory demonstrations, intended for use in experimental psychology courses or labs. He assembled a group of collaborators from the Harvard Laboratory of Psychophysics and elsewhere that ultimately created a set of ten cassette tapes with 20 demonstrations. Demonstrations included critical band, asymmetry of masking, binaural beats, temporal integration, categorical speech perception, combination tones, Shepard tones, and periodicity pitch among others. The demonstrations were well chosen to cope with the limitations of the cassette medium. Ten years later, cassette tapes had been replaced by compact discs, and the Eindhoven group with Houtsma, Rossing, and Wegenaars created a similar set of digital demonstrations. Those recordings are now available from the Acoustical Society of America as the “Auditory Demonstrations IPO-NIU-ASA” CD. This talk will compare those two sets of recorded demonstrations and indicate the influence that the Harvard tapes had on the ASA CDs, what was kept, what was changed, what was improved, and what was not.