Psychophysical scales are built from repeated ratio-adjustment judgments plus an anchor point

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. The subjective attribute value of the anchor sound corresponds to a certain value of the objective attribute value. This is used, for instance, for loudness and pitch scales defined later in this book. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 921

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Explains how magnitude/ratio production tasks yield constructed absolute scales for loudness and pitch.

Related

• Psychophysical scales are built by adjusting sounds to match reference ratios (similarity 0.94)
• Relative magnitude judgments can be anchored into absolute psychophysical scales (similarity 0.90)
• Magnitude estimation of loudness yields only relative, not absolute, values. (similarity 0.83)
• Thresholds and auditory scales link physical sound attributes to perceived auditory events (similarity 0.82)
• Humans cannot reliably report auditory attributes on absolute internal scales. (similarity 0.82)
• Listeners cannot report auditory attributes on an absolute scale (similarity 0.81)
• Psychoacoustics quantifies physical sound signals into perceived auditory attributes (similarity 0.81)
• Perceived loudness can be measured by iterative ratio-matching across subjects (similarity 0.80)
• Perceived loudness meters must weight frequencies as a compromise across sound levels. (similarity 0.79)
• Cross-modality scaling yields a true ratio scale that numeric rating cannot guarantee. (similarity 0.79)
• Paired comparison against anchors reduces bias in absolute judgments (similarity 0.79)
• Thresholds are measured by presenting many stimulus levels and fitting a psychometric function (similarity 0.79)
• Loudness is the sensation most directly tied to sound intensity (similarity 0.79)
• Loudness is measured psycho-acoustically via magnitude estimation against a reference (similarity 0.79)
• Magnitude estimation lets listeners assign numbers proportional to perceived loudness. (similarity 0.78)