Estimation of Differences Between Successive Sounds

The estimation of differences between subsequently presented test-sounds was investigated experimentally using paired comparisons. Experiments with sinusoidal tones, low-pass filtered tones, low-pass and high-pass filtered noise show that intervals of different sound parameters, e.g. frequency and sound-pressure level of sinusoidal tones, are estimated to be equivalent if they comprise equal numbers of jnd's. Hence the subjective distance between two sounds is proposed to be specified by the corresponding number of jnd's. Subjective distances resulting from simultaneous differences with regard to several sound parameters can be described by equivalent intervals of a single parameter. Further experiments show that the subjective distance is related to its components by quadratic summation.