On Loudness as a Function of Tone Duration

According to the prevailing evidence, the loudness level of short tone bursts increases with their duration at a rate of about 10 dB/decade. It is not clear, however, whether the data refer to total loudness or to instantaneous loudness reached at a particular point in time. In order to answer the question, listeners were instructed to respond to instantaneous loudness at the end of tone bursts in one series of experiments and to total loudness in another. They had to adjust the loudness level of a 10-msec comparison burst accordingly. Not all listeners could change their criterion, but those who could showed that instantaneous loudness depends little on tone duration, whereas total loudness increases at a rate of almost 10 dB/decade up to a duration of at least 500 msec. These results are consistent with our findings on temporal loudness effects in pairs of short sound bursts. Previous results according to which loudness increases up to a duration of about 80 msec may be explained by the listeners' tendency to respond to total loudness at very short durations and to instantaneous loudness at longer ones.