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Re: [AUDITORY] [duration & loudness : how to equate (subjectively)]

Dear colleagues, 

Let me first wish you all a happy New Year 2025 in all realms of your life and second, thank you all for your inputs.

As inquired by some of you, I list below a summary of some helpful responses I received re. the original duration loudness matching question. 

The roving approach (a few colleagues advised this in the past) as Dardo Fereiri describes it: "the way we (and many others) go about avoiding intensity (or perceived loudness) being a cue is to randomize it. We call it roving the stimulus. Basically presenting each stimulus at a random intensity within a certain dB range. The range depends on the amount of stimuli and their similarities, but usually a 10dB range should do the trick."

The subjective matching approach as described by Ken Grant: "we chose to match each sound sample to a 1000 pure tone. We did this subjectively by letting listeners (in our case, the subject in the study) with a slider that they set. The 1000 Hz tone and sound sample were presented sequentially.  We did this because loudness and timbre are related to each other (eg., which part of the spectrum is contributing most to the perception of loudness). [...] High frequency sounds are perceptually louder than low frequency sounds so the most obvious step is to loudness match before pitch matching."

The modeling approach using Brian Moore's work: https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/hearing

With best regards, 
Virginie

Virginie van Wassenhove

Dir. Cognition & Brain Dynamics 
CEA/DRF/Joliot/NeuroSpin | INSERM Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit | Univ. Paris-Saclay
Co-Direction DIM C-BRAINS  | Associate Editor, JoCN
My working hours may not be the same as yours, please respond on your own time!

On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 8:11 AM Virginie van Wassenhove <virginie.van.wassenhove@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear colleagues and auditory experts, 

I am reaching out to the auditory community to evaluate existing methods / experimental tricks to equate the loudness of sounds as a function of their duration.

Context: in the timing literature, one wants to ensure that participants use timing and not any other (intensity, loudness, spectral, pitch...) cue to estimate the duration of a stimulus.  For this, one conservative approach is to use an "empty interval", namely a gap in noise for very short timing, or two transient sounds delimiting silence (aka a time interval). Alternatively, a "filled duration" (pure tone, noise, etc...) can be used, risking the use of alternative cues. To use a filled duration, one must ensure that the loudness of the sound is equal across durations. 

My question to you is:
What is the best and fastest way (from the viewpoint of experimental implementation) to equalize loudness across auditory stimuli? The range of durations is from 100 ms to 3 s. For other experimental reasons, we'd prefer a pure tone (440 Hz) over noise.

I'd welcome your tips, insights or pointers to papers you may have.

If anyone has a reprint of this one, that would also be great: 
Sharon M. Abel; Duration Discrimination of Noise and Tone Bursts. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 April 1972; 51 (4B): 1219–1223. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1912963 

With best wishes,
Virginie


Dir. Cognition & Brain Dynamics 
CEA/DRF/Joliot/NeuroSpin | INSERM Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit | Univ. Paris-Saclay
Co-Direction DIM C-BRAINS  | Associate Editor, JoCN
My working hours may not be the same as yours, please respond on your own time!