Psychoacoustic findings are experimentally established yet often lack anatomical or physical explanation.

Evidence

It should be noted that many of the psychoacoustic effects have been observed experimentally, mainly as a result of playing sounds that are carefully controlled in terms of their acoustic nature to panels of listeners from whom responses are monitored. These responses are often the result of comparing two sounds and indicating, for example, which is louder or higher in pitch or “brighter.” Many of the results from such experiments cannot as yet be described in terms of either where anatomically or by what physical means they occur. Psychoacoustics is a developing field of research. However, the results from such experiments give a firm foundation for understanding the nature of human perception of musical sounds, and knowledge of minimum changes that are perceived provide useful guidelines for those exploring the subtleties of sound synthesis. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 512

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in silence and listening — psychoacoustics’ empirical-but-unexplained status parallels the phenomenology of sonic experience in The Soundscape.