Natural complex sounds make level changes easier to hear than pure tones do.

Evidence

There is some evidence that once more than a few harmonics are present, the just-noticeable difference is closer to the broad-band case, of 0.5 to 1 dB, rather than the pure tone case. As a general rule of thumb, the just-noticeable difference in sound level is about 1 dB. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 649

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Raising the level of a complex tone shifts its pitch downward. (similarity 0.89)
• The ear’s amplitude sensitivity varies with loudness and tonal complexity (similarity 0.86)
• Pitch strength and loudness scale at sharply different rates with level changes. (similarity 0.85)
• Pitch strength rises only modestly with level while loudness explodes. (similarity 0.85)
• A 40 dB level increase shifts pure-tone pitch by at most about 3 percent (similarity 0.85)
• Raising a sound’s loudness shifts its perceived pitch except near 1-2 kHz. (similarity 0.83)
• Noise-type sounds have far weaker pitch strength than pure or complex tones. (similarity 0.83)
• Detecting level variation is about 2.5 times harder than detecting level difference (similarity 0.83)
• Raising intensity lowers pitch at low frequencies but raises it at high frequencies. (similarity 0.82)
• A 10 dB change roughly doubles or halves perceived loudness for complex sounds (similarity 0.82)
• Humans can typically discriminate level differences of 1 to 2 dB (similarity 0.82)
• The just-noticeable difference quantifies the smallest audible change in a sound (similarity 0.81)
• Complex-tone pitch tracks the spectral pitch of lower components (similarity 0.81)
• Incomplete complex tones show twice the pitch deviation of complete ones (similarity 0.81)
• Just-noticeable amplitude modulation drops steeply as tone level rises (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Raising a tone’s level lowers low-frequency pitch but raises high-frequency pitch #complicates (0.72) — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 3272