Careful listening tests validly reveal how acoustic attributes become auditory attributes.

Evidence

This chapter discussed various methods used to study the functionality of hearing mechanisms by psychoacoustic means; that is, by presenting sound events to subjects and asking them to perform some tasks in a formal listening test method. The field is quite mature: if a test is designed carefully, the results indeed provide valid information on the attributes of an auditory event, generated by acoustic attributes of a sound event. In other words, psychoacoustic test methods can be used to measure the psychophysical functions that transfer acoustic attributes into auditory attributes. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 952

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines descriptive sensory analysis and the psychophysical transfer function concept central to communication acoustics.