Page 48 - Summer 2015

William A. Yost
Postal:
Speech and Hearing Science Arizona State University PO Box 870102 Tempe, Arizona 85287 USA
Email:
william.yost@asu.edu
Psychoacoustics:
A Brief Historical Overview
From Pythagoras to Helmholtz to Fletcher to Green and Swets, a centu- ries-long historical overview of psychoacoustics.
Figure 1. Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), “Father of Psychophysics.”
What is psychoacoustics?1 Psychoacous- tics is the psychophysical study of acous- tics. OK, psychophysics is the study of the relationship between sensory per- ception (psychology) and physical vari- ables (physics), e.g., how does perceived loudness (perception) relate to sound pressure level (physical variable)? “Psy- chophysics” was coined by Gustav Fech- ner (Figure 1) in his book Elemente der Psychophysik (1860; Elements of Psycho- physics).2 Fechner’s treatise covered at least three topics: psychophysical meth- ods, psychophysical relationships, and panpsychism (the notion that the mind is a universal aspect of all things and, as such, panpsychism rejects the Cartesian dualism of mind and body).
1
Today psychoacoustics is usually broadly described as auditory perception or just hearing, although the latter term also includes the biological aspects of hearing (physiological acoustics). Psychoacoustics includes research involving humans and nonhuman animals, but this review just covers human psychoacoustics. With- in the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the largest Technical Committee is Physiological and Psychological Acoustics (P&P), and Psychological Acoustics is psychoacoustics.
Trying to summarize the history of psychoacoustics in about 5,000 words is a challenge. I had to make difficult decisions about what to cover and omit. My history stops around 1990. I do not cover in any depth speech, music, animal bioacoustics, physiological acoustics, and architectural acoustic topics because these may be future Acoustics Today historical overviews. I focus on aspects of pitch perception and sound source localization because these topics have a very long history of study. I briefly cover other topics, but many had to be omitted. The overview will be “English-centric,” at least after the 1920s. I am fluent only in English, so my knowledge of psychoacoustics is dominated by what I have heard and read, and Acoustics Today is a magazine of the ASA and JASA is the scientific journal of the ASA. I believe it is fair to say that the majority of the articles written on psychoacoustics from 1929 (ASA’s founding) to the end of the 20th century appeared in English in JASA. I have attempted to recognize key scholars who did not always publish in English, but I am sure that I have not done a good job of covering non-English psychoacoustic contributions.
2 See Internet Archive BookReader: https://www.google.com/#q=Elemente+der+Psychophysik+. 46 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2015, volume 11, issue 3 ©2015 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.