“What you see is what you get” is a common expression. However, when it comes to sound “what you hear is not always what you get”. This is the beauty of psychoacoustics. A good example of this is the mp3-format that compresses audio files into next to nothing without the human brain hardly being able to separate the compressed sound from the original full scale recording.
The essence of psychoacoustics is that signals that are picked up by your ears doesn’t automatically mean that your brain is hearing the same sounds the way they first entered your ears. One might say that the brain acts as a signal processor with limited bandwidth. It simply cannot grasp all of the information that enters. In order to explain and understand how the brain interprets and reacts to sound we use psychoacoustics.
No small physical apparatus possesses properties more remarkable than those of the ear. It can withstand the most intense sounds produced by nature, while at the other extreme it responds to sound pressures that at some frequencies produce a displacement of the ear drum of 0.1 nanometer. This distance is less than one tenth the diameter of a hydrogen molecule!
So the hearing mechanism is, apart from being an extremely sensitive microphone with enormous dynamic range, also a signal analyzer and processor with considerable selectivity.
Take for instance the ears ability to sort out irrelevant background noise. If you have stayed late at work sometime you probably have noticed the relaxation and quietness when the air ventilation fans in the room shut down. But you may recall that just prior to the shut down you didn’t spend one second reflecting over the background noise - because your brain filtered out the background noise as irrelevant information.
Our hearing has many other filtering functions - most of them quite brilliant for life in the nature, but some not so brilliant in the modern, industrialized community. Nowadays, many man-made sounds are harmful to our hearing.
By improving our understanding of how the human hearing works, we can protect ourselves and our surroundings by creating smarter and more pleasant product sounds that catches our proper attention at the right time.
For instance, a car producer might want to send a message to their customers that their car is of good quality. By applying various psychoacoustic criteria and parameters we may quantify sounds associated with good quality, or soft/strong for that matter. All this because during our lifetime we have collected a library of sounds associated with happenings and materials.
Müller-BBM Scandinavia and our affiliated companies have extensive experience and competence in the field of psychoacoustics and applications that utilize our magnificent hearing’s capability of “interpreting” sound. Müller-BBM Scandinavia offers you first class advice and consultation on the benefits of and how to give your product a certain acoustic signature.
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