Listeners base perceived loudness on sounds they attend to, ignoring others
Evidence
The interpretation of complex sounds that cover the whole frequency range is further complicated by psychological effects, in that a listener will attend to particular parts of the sound, such as the soloist or conversation, and ignore or be less aware of other sounds and will tend to base their perception of loudness on what they have attended to. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 668
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- SEED: Could seed an essay on how selective attention shapes individual acoustic reality in loud shared spaces.
Related
- Perceived loudness of complex sounds depends on what the listener attends to. (similarity 0.91)
- Attention shapes what a listener perceives as loud in complex soundscapes (similarity 0.86)
- Listeners can distinguish loudspeaker resonances from instrument resonances (similarity 0.85)
- Acoustic prominence depends on culture and attention, not loudness (similarity 0.84)
- Individual listeners differ in which abilities support their speech perception per situation (similarity 0.83)
- Acoustics remains an open field with room for new discoveries (similarity 0.83)
- Listener perception depends on sound power, direct sound, and reflections by frequency band (similarity 0.83)
- Individual listeners differ in situational strengths, not just overall speech-in-noise ability. (similarity 0.82)
- Loudness correlates vary by region, not by a single uniform code (similarity 0.82)
- Loudness perception involves central mechanisms beyond cochlear vibration (similarity 0.82)
- Listeners can perceptually separate loudspeaker timbre from room coloration in comparisons (similarity 0.82)
- The brain processes sounds inside a critical band as a single lumped item. (similarity 0.82)
- Auditory pathway neural activity linearly encodes perceived loudness, not sound level (similarity 0.82)
- Perceived loudness does not map one-to-one onto acoustic amplitude (similarity 0.82)
- Each listener has a stable, individual weighting of frequencies when hearing speech in noise (similarity 0.82)