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Random Tones (decreasing durations)

Overall rating (4 ratings)
Speedenza

June 30th, 2014

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Sound effects > Experimental

Experimental sound that arose from a forum discussion. The sound consists of fast changing single tones with random frequency in the range 200Hz to 2kHz. At the start of the sound the tone changes every 20ms. The tones become progressively shorter (in continuous fashion) at a rate of 1ms every second, ie 20ms at t=0, 19ms at t=1s, 18ms at t=2s etc.

This was intended to be a crude test of perception of temporal resolution - at some point we expected the discrete 'bleepy' tones to decay in to mushy noise - which they kind of do near the end.

Reading around the web it seems that temporal resolution perception is an ongoing (and complex) area of research. This test probably doesn't add much to the sum of human knowledge. But it's fun! And possibly useful for teaching or research.

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beeps
bleeps
education
experiment
experimental
hearing
noise
perception
psychoacoustics
random
research
resolution
sine
temporal
temporal-resolution
test

Type

Wave (.wav)

Duration

0:20.000

File size

1.7 MB

Sample rate

44100.0 Hz

Bit depth

16 bit

Channels

Mono

Comments
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R
RockitBoi

11 years, 4 months ago

I'm down with the psyko thing. This is so cool! Thanks

Speedenza

11 years, 4 months ago

AlienXXX - I think you're right! We need to investigate this more...

AlienXXX

11 years, 4 months ago

Excellent sound experiment! Thanks for posting.

I was thinking about this and maybe a more representative test of temporal resolution test is a repetition of tones of the same pitch with gaps in between - At which point does the brain perceive the sound as a tone rather than a sequence of short tones?
In the case of these sounds generated from multiple short tones, the difference in pitch probably accentuates the brain's ability to perceive that something is going on on a very short time scale. - I don't know, I am speculating...
But this certainly is a very interesting series of sound experiments.

You should include in the description a link to the forum discussion.
Also, here are 2 tags you should consider adding to all these sounds: Psychoacoustics temporal-resolution

  1. 304 downloads
  2. 3 comments
Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
You are free to share (to copy, distribute and transmit) and to remix (to adapt and modify) as long as you credit the author of the sound and do not use the sound for commercial purposes. Get attribution text...
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