Basic Psychoacoustic Quantities

This chapter describes the psychoacoustic quantities at the lowest level of analysis: pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration, which are more or less related to the physical quantities frequency, level, magnitude spectrum, and time. Pitch is perceived from many types of sounds, such as sinusoids, vocals, instrument sounds, and noisy sounds. However, the definition is problematic in the sense that not all sounds have clear pitch, and some of them have more than one pitch. The theory describing loudness perception is one of the central theories of psychoacoustics. The theory is used to explain different phenomena revealed by psychoacoustic experiments using different kinds of stimuli, starting with simple sinusoids and continuing gradually to more complex cases. When two sounds have the same pitch, loudness, and duration, timbre is what makes one particular musical sound different from another.