[LAD] twice as loud

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:57:41PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

> one little side problem with this is that our sensitivity to both
> loudness and brightness is adaptive. this means that although one
> could do some experimental work to determine the ratios that lead most
> people to judge one sound 2x as loud as another, as soon as you leave
> the experimental context, it becomes pretty meaningless in any
> practical sense. what you judge as quiet or loud (or bright or dim)
> depends an awful lot on what you've just been listening to. given that
> our sensitivity to volume is non-linear, it only takes some
> pre-exposure to a very quiet or very loud environment to totally skew
> the part of the curve that we're on when we try to establish how loud
> something is.
> 
> to be clear, i'm not suggesting that its not possible to come up with
> some useful and interesting numbers by measuring this sort of thing. i
> just want to note that they have to be viewed as deeply fuzzy because
> of the effect of the pre-listening environment in setting sensitivity
> levels.

Absolutely true. 

Extrapolating a bit, that is one of the reasons why an 
unamplified singer in an opera theatre can have a dramatic
effect that is much stronger than someone yelling into a
microphone and being amplified to 130 dB SPL. By which I
don't want to imply that amplified music is wrong in any
sense.

Ciao,

-- 
FA

There are three of them, and Alleline.