Final Exam Flashcards
What is sound?
pressure fluctuations in the air
What is loudness?
the psychological aspect of sound related to perceived intensity or amplitude
What is pitch?
the psychological aspect of sound related mainly to the fundamental frequency
What is frequency?
The number of cycles per second
What is audibility?
due to a combination of frequency and amplitude
What is the Equal-loudness curve?
a graph plotting sound pressure level (dB SPL) against the frequency for which a listener perceives constant loudness
What is the harmonic spectrum?
the spectrum of a complex sound in which energy is at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency
What is fundamental frequency?
the lowest-frequency component of a complex periodic sound
What is timbre?
the psychological sensation by which a listener can judge that two sounds with the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar
What is the Missing-fundamental effect?
the pitch listeners hear corresponds to the fundamental frequency, even if it is missing
What is characteristic frequency (CF)?
auditory nerve (AN) fibers are relatively selective for a given frequency
What is temporal coding?
auditory nerve (AN) firing is also “phase-locked”, meaning that neurons systematically fire at a given time point of the cycle
What is the volley principle?
even if individual AN fibers can’t keep the pace, the whole population of neurons can still temporarily encode the frequency
What is tinnitus?
- The perception of sound in the absence of sound waves
* Prevalence increases with age
What are interneural time differences?
the difference in time between a sound arriving at one ear versus the other
