![]() What Fletcher and Munson found out was that the human ear does not perceive loudness equally across the frequency spectrum, and that for very low and high frequencies, a greater sound pressure level is required to hear them with the same loudness. ![]() The first is dependent on an organic perceptive element, whereas the latter is just an arbitrary measurement of physical phenomena moving through mass.Įver heard of Fletcher and Munson? They wrote a pretty neat paper about this topic back in 1933 entitled “Loudness, its Definition, Measurement and Calculation”. These two are not interchangeable, though they were once thought to be the same thing! Loudness refers to the psychological perception of sound relative to the function of human hearing (pressure given in Pascals), whereas Intensity is a physical quantity which measures the units of sound energy moving through an area in a unit of time (Watts per meter squared). This means that the logarithmic scale is a great tool to represent the very broad range of perception that the ear can cover in terms of loudness.įigure 1: Various scal es: lin - lin, lin - log, log - lin, and log - log. (Wikipedia source). This is because the human ear functions very much in a logarithmic fashion, whereby the threshold of perception occurs at a doubling of level. įirstly, it’s important to consider that whenever you refer to a scale related to the amplitude of a sound wave, it can be represented either linearly or logarithmically. This document is going to give you a quick run down of the most important concepts to be understood, and make some suggestions for optimising your listening conditions based on the science of hearing. ![]() You may already be familiar with some terms and concepts, but it’s easily one of the most misconstrued topics that we encounter in the field, simply because it can be understood and represented in many different ways. There are many many parts to understanding sound levels. It has a definition (or rather a couple thereof), and it’s important to understand it if you want to steer clear of damaging your hearing, or work towards improving your audio workflow. LOUDNESS! It’s not a relative thing, contrary to what you or your neighbours may think.
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