Abstract:

This study was designed to extent the range of auditory stimuli used to study magnitude estimation scaling of loudness. The five stimuli chosen were: a 1000-Hz pure tone; narrow band noise (700--1300 Hz bandwidth); broadband noise (100--10 000 Hz bandwidth); rock music [Led Zeppelin, Atlantic Recording Corp., CD Recording No. 19127-2 (1969)]; and babble speech [D. Kalikow, K. Stevens, and L. Elliott, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 61, 1337--1351 (1977)]. Subjects were 30 normal young adult women. During the auditory magnitude estimation task for each of the five stimuli, a subject was instructed to assign numers to that simulus which was presented in a randomly ordered series of nine sensation levels (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 dB SL). An analysis of variance repeated measured design showed no difference in the numerical responses of the subjects for the five different stimuli. Results suggest the presence of an underlying stabilizing factor (internal scaling mechanism) that allows adult subjects to consistently scale loudness irrespective of the type of auditory stimulus presented [J. Zwislocki and D. Goodman, Percept. Psychophys. 28, 28--38 (1980)].