Re: [AUDITORY] Number of critical bands in human hearing?

[James Johnston <audioskeptic@xxxxxxxxx>]

A "critical band" or better an "ERB" is defined at any point on the cochlea.

The "number" of them is therefore an odd question.  If you stack ERB's next to each other, that's a more meaningful question, but even then what happens at low frequencies is still under some debate the last I've seen.

So, maybe the question of "translate ERB to Frequency Range" is a better question, and then you can stack them end to end if you must, but speaking as someone who has written a lot of different masking threshold calculations for various audio codecs, you really need to have much finer resolution than that, and then handle the "overlap" so that for any given frequency, you're close to using an ERB centered at that frequency. Even 'centered' is a bit of a tricky question since you'd like to have some invariance of shape across different centers, but that's more than I want to write at 11PM tonight. :)

On Thu, Sep 14, 2023 at 9:12 PM Smits, J.C.M. (Cas) <c.smits@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The number of 24 CB refers (probably) to the Bark scale (Zwicker 1961, JASA). But it covers only the frequencies upto 15.5 kHz. So you need a few more to get to 20 kHz…

 

Best,

Cas Smits

 

Van: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Namens Richard F. Lyon
Verzonden: 14 September 2023 07:21
Aan: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Onderwerp: Re: Number of critical bands in human hearing?

 

I think critical bands are not discrete countable things.

But if you want to divide up the range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz into CB-size bands, then there should be an answer, though it will be more at low sound levels than at high sound levels.  24 sounds plausible for moderate sound level.  If you count ERBs at low level, you'll get more than that, maybe about 40.

Dick

 

 

On Wed, Sep 13, 2023 at 9:14 PM David Jackson Morris <dmorris@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear all,

 

In teaching an undergrad course on hearing science the students have asked, how many critical bands are there in normal healthy hearing? The text that we use says that there are 24.   If I ask ChatGPT it also cites Fletcher and Munson’s estimation of 24, but what would it know. . .  

 

Am I right in suspecting that this may have been revised upwards at some stage (?).  Is the collective wisdom of the list able to help with this or point to an authoritative source? 

 

Cheers

David

 

 

David Jackson Morris, PhD, LTCL

Associate Professor/Lektor

 

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Emil Holms Kanal 2

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James D. (jj) Johnston

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