Relative magnitude judgments can be anchored into absolute psychophysical scales

Evidence

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. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 921