Loudness growth of musically complex stimuli.
Young adults (N = 11) with musical training, and with previous practice in the use of direct magnitude estimation of loudness for pure tones, judged the loudness of 3 orchestral excerpts each lasting 15-25 sec, varied in 5 -db steps over a 35 -db range. Excerpt I was relatively constant in both pitch and loudness; Excerpt II varied in loudness but did not change greatly in pitch; and Excerpt III changed both in pitch and loudness. The slopes of power functions for loudness judgments as a function of SPL fell within the usual range for pure-tone and for white-noise stimuli, as did indexes of determination; but both measures differed significantly from those in the literature for continuous speech. Apparently the acoustic variability in speech is an insufficient explanation for the difference between speech and non-speech stimuli in these areas, a finding which points to the contribution of non-acoustic parameters, such as semantic meaning, in loudness judgments for speech.
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception; D009146:Music