WBF Library: Human hearing system and acoustics

[jack_bouska]

Live End Dead End studio control room design described by the inventor, in a very accessible writing style.
Don Davis: the LEDE concept, Audio 1987
http://jgbouska.tripod.com/audio/d_davis_lede_audio_1987_p1.pdf

Jack Bouska

 

[amirm]

Thanks Jack. Added it to the list.

 

[jkeny]

I know this thread hasn't been posted to in quite a while - has all research in this area died or are members no longer interested in papers?
Anyway, here's a recent & worthwhile addition, I feel "Human Time-Frequency Acuity Beats the Fourier Uncertainty Principle" [url]http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.4611.pdf[/URL]

And a presentation from RMAF11 given by Martin Mallinson, then CTO of ESS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CkyrDIGzOE "Noise Sahping Sigma Delta DACS" - slides here http://www.esstech.com/pdf/noise-shaping-sigma-delta.pdf

 

[Justus]

Another interesting paper - published in the Journal of the European Acoustics Association 2008. The finding that temporal resolution of the human auditory system to be three times shorter than found in past investigations. Thus, while an ultrasonic pure tone might not be audible in itself, the study seems to find that the ear might be sensitive when it is present as a harmonic to an audible frequency.

http://www.physics.sc.edu/kunchur/temporal.pdf

The author even takes a poke at us

Emphasis mine - may be he intends to measure the audibility of cable next

Being open to and excited by the notion of hearing >20kHz I tried to replicate one of Kunchur's studies.
I used a professional psychoacoustic setup (Tucker Davis, Matlab, Stax) in a soundbooth (33dB SPL noise) and presented blind, randomized the same two-tone stimuli as Kunchur did.
That is: 7kHz sine, with or without 21kHz at same phase and SPL as Kunchur reportedly used, all using a cosine^2 envelope.

Three young adults and myself, all with normal hearing, could not discriminate them when presented blind, randomized.


Anyone who wants to try for themselves can stop by the lab and I'll give them a shot.

I contacted Kunchur half a year ago for suggestions but never got a reply.

Given that he is not a trained psychophysicist I suspect he unknowingly provided cues unrelated to the hypothesis at hand.
I suspect they were not auditory cues, given the proper controls he seems to have done.
So, I seriously doubt his conclusions from that paper....

Best,
Justus

 

[Justus]

Perhaps it was 8 and 24kHZ -- I forget,been a while.

In addition, just playing with different settings we never got any detection with 3rd harmonic beyond ~20kHz at ~60-80dB and various phase angles rel to ground tone...oh well.

Justus

 

[GaryProtein]

It sounds like you have the equipment and blind testing ability to debunk a lot of so called "truths".

I'm interested in hearing more.

 

[Justus]

hey gary, his other test involved moving one ribbon tweeter rel to another in a dead room, results implying similar hi res hearing abilities beyond the 20 khz limit. love to test that, but lack such room.

you cold attempt his setup with audacity at 2496 sines at specified phase and using abx comparator. use stax or similar 30 khz bw headphones. ideally measure too, to validate. i used my Earthworks 23 mic.

other tests you are into?