Psychoacoustical demonstrations—Potential and peril

Abstract

As a study of human sensation, psychoacoustics would seem to mesh well with appealing lecture demonstrations. To be meaningful, the study demands that students experience sounds personally. At the same time, the psychoacoustics literature offers a rich source of sonic effects, paradigms, and illusions. However, there are potential problems. Whereas psychoacoustical experiments normally involve trained subjects listening to headphones in an acoustically ideal environment, lecture demonstrations involve naive subjects listening to a loudspeaker in a room that may be far from ideal. There is always a risk that an important psychoacoustical effect will fail as a demonstration, either because listeners are not prepared to recognize the effect or because of the acoustical properties of the room. For example, rooms effects can seriously compromise demonstrations of the asymmetry of masking; room effects do not compromise critical‐bandwidth measurement by masking. Some demonstrations (pitch shift effects and pitc...