Tone-to-noise ratio fails when multiple tones share a critical band
Evidence
There is no really clear method to measure tonality, although there are several starting points from which it can be quantified. Some methods are described below. A simple measure for tonality is the tone-to-noise ratio, T/N, which has also been standardized in ISO-7779 (2010). It measures the level of a tone compared to the level of the surrounding frequency band. Unfortunately, if there are multiple tones present in a critical band, the T/N method does not match the perceived tonality. The prominence ratio, PR (Bienvenue and Nobile, 1991) is a better approach in such cases; here, the power of the critical band containing the prominent tone is compared to the mean power in adjacent critical bands. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1244
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
Related
- No single standard method measures perceived tonality accurately (similarity 0.95)
- Noise is masked more easily by tonal parts than tones are masked by noise (similarity 0.78)
- Two tones within a critical band interact to reduce total loudness (similarity 0.78)