Introspection alone cannot serve as accepted scientific auditory observation

Evidence

This ability to observe one’s own internal events is called introspection. This may be useful to a researcher in order to acquire a general picture of the auditory perception, but, on the other hand, introspective observation is seldom accepted as a scientific method as such. This is because of the subjective nature of such observations that may easily have a strong bias due to many disturbing factors and the fact that a single subject may not be representative of general behaviour. Therefore, in general, auditory events should be studied by an external observer, statistical methods should be applied (or at least one must be aware of the statistical nature of the process), and several subjects should be involved, unless the goal is to know the behaviour of a specific subject. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 849

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines introspection in the psychoacoustic context and explains why it fails as a method.