> I note your careful wording or caveats
Yes indeed, I did carefully leave some outs so that no one can blame me for=
what I said! That is, don't shoot the messenger.
but...
> I have always had a huge problem in believing in Sones
> Seems to me to be "dodgy science"
> How the F*** can anyone say sound x is twice as loud as sound y?
> the equivalent of how orangey is fruit A than fruit B
You're not wrong to express these doubts. At the very least one will have =
the questions of how difficult it is to make these determinations, how repe=
atable they are, and also how useful they are.
The answer to the third question is that objectifying subjective qualities =
can be very useful. As an example, let us suppose that I am in the busines=
s of selling oranges, and I wish to grade them as to their beauty, then it =
is to my advantage to be able to measure qualities like "orange-ness". OK.=
We in this group don't care about how orange things are. But suppose you=
ask me to "Make it twice as loud", but I only have a knob or a slider that=
's labeled in dB. Then I need to have at least some sort of a guide as to =
what 'twice as loud' is, in dB.
Part of the utility of this sort of thing has to come from the (desired) fa=
ct that different person's perceptions are similar. I haven't done these p=
articular experiments (loudness growth), but I have done experiments with l=
oudness matching, and some pretty remarkable things came out of that. I as=
ked my subjects to match the loudness (by changing the level) of varying au=
dio recordings. Something like making the loudness of a car crash equivale=
nt to the loudness of an operatic soprano. A typical subject reaction is "=
I can't do that. It's like comparing apples and oranges." But it turns ou=
t that they then proceed to do it, and that expert subjects (mixing enginee=
rs and such like) can match loudness levels repeatably to within an increme=
nt as small as 1/4 dB. Which is quite remarkable.
Now, it does turn out that different person's judgments do differ, but not =
as much as you might think. If you take a large collection of recordings o=
f frog vocalizations, and adjust them so that YOU think that they are all t=
he same loudness, then it turns out that you will almost certainly (95% con=
fidence) be within a couple of dB of what other people think is equal loudn=
ess.
Of course, you may not want the frog recordings to be equal loudness...
We're on the edge of something that is purely personal (like, what does the=
color 'red' mean to you?), but that is far too difficult for me to tackle.=
What is of meaning to me is that if someone asks me to make it twice as l=
oud, I can turn up the level by 10 dB and be close to what it is that they =
want.
Eric
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