Auditory acuity for aircraft in real-world ambient environments.
Although many psychoacoustic studies have been conducted to examine the detection of masked target sounds, the vast majority of these studies have been conducted in carefully controlled laboratory listening environments, and their results may not apply to the detection of real-world sounds in the presence of naturalistic ambient sound fields. Those studies that have examined the detection of realistic naturally-occurring sounds have been conducted in uncontrolled listening environments (i.e., outdoor listening tests) where the experimenters were unable to precisely control, or even measure, the specific characteristics of the target and masker at the time of the detection judgment. This study represents an attempt to bridge the gap between unrealistic laboratory listening studies and uncontrolled outdoor listening studies through the use of pseudorandomly-presented real world recordings of target and masking sounds. Subjects were asked to detect helicopter signals in the context of an ongoing ambient recording in a two interval detection task. The results show that the signal-to-noise ratio required to detect an aircraft sound varies across different types of ambient environments (i.e., rural, suburban, or urban).
Hoglund
Evelyn
E
Air Force Research Laboratory, Human Effectiveness Directorate, 2610 Seventh Street, WPAFB, Ohio 45433, USA. hoglund.1@osu.edu
Brungart
Douglas
D
Iyer
Nandini
N
Hamil
James
J
Mobley
Frank
F
Hall
John
J
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000401:Aircraft; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D005260:Female; D006320:Hearing Tests / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009624:Noise, Transportation; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult