Psychophysical scales are built by adjusting sounds to match reference ratios

Evidence

Besides finding thresholds, this method can be used in other tasks. For example, in magnitude production, the subject is asked to adjust a certain attribute of a sound event until the desired magnitude is reached. Similarly, in ratio production, the adjustment is made to obtain a ratio between the auditory attribute of each of two percepts. In early psychoacoustic experimenting, many of the tests were conducted by asking the subject to adjust an acoustic attribute of a test sound so as to produce the attribute that corresponded to, say, twice that of a reference value. By repeating this procedure for a new reference value every time, a relative psychophysical scale is derived, which can further be made into an absolute scale by choosing a single anchor point with a specified anchor sound. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 921

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies magnitude production and ratio production as technique variants for deriving relative and absolute psychophysical scales.