Ear-adequate spectral analysis for noise evaluation

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In numerous sound situations, sound quality cannot be determined by means of conventional measuring techniques. The frequent discrepancy between subjective judgment of sound events yielded by standard measurement procedures, can be explained by the difference between a sound situation as received by a single omnidirectional microphone, on the one hand, and as received by the human hearing, on the other hand. A new procedure using a dummy head and a special binaural analyzer has been developed for spectral analysis that realizes frequency and time resolution in the entire audio spectral range. This is comparable to the properties of human hearing, which is able to perceive quickly changing time structures and minor frequency differences at the same time. New approaches for ear-adequate noise evaluation in order to judge noise quality can be achieved by means of psychoacoustic properties of human heating and binaural signal processing. The results of these investigations show that human hearing, which has two auditory paths with a complex directional characteristic and a binaural pattern recognition, gives a different judgment of noise quality as compared to conventional measurement methods, especially in complex sound situations with a spatial distribution of several sound sources and a sound-pressure level below 85 dB.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: