Re: 'Persistance of hearing' (William Hartmann )

Subject: Re: 'Persistance of hearing'
From:    William Hartmann  <hartmann(at)PA.MSU.EDU>
Date:    Tue, 12 Apr 2005 09:32:41 -0400

CN,

Agreed. There is a tendency for listeners to maintain a selective
attention to fixed frequency regions. We discovered a similar kind of
hysteresis in experiments varying the phase of a sine tone at onset. As
the onset noise moved from low to high frequencies listeners seemed to
maintain a focus on the thump until the click became too loud to ignore,
and vice versa. The work is reviewed starting on page 305 of Signals,
Sound, and Sensation.

wmh

Craig Nicol wrote:

> I've been looking at Timbre Spaces for a while, in particular the
> spaces by Grey in the 1970s. In one of his papers he mentions an
> experiment where two sounds are chosen (let's call them A and B), and
> a set of sounds is generated morphing from A to B. What he discovered
> is that there is a hysteresis effect when listening to the morphing,
> i.e. If the sounds are played from A to B, the listener will report
> hearing A for over half the samples whereas if the sounds are played
> from B to A, the listener will report hearing B for more samples.
>
> I am vaguely aware of similar optical illusions such as persistence of
> vision and I was wondering if anyone could direct me to more
> information on this effect in hearing as I want to know if this effect
> is particular to the timbre space or is a product of human perception.
>
> Regards,
> Craig Nicol.
>