Psychoacoustics studies how humans perceive and interact with sound, including pitch perception and sound localization. It can help create realistic sound experiences in music, film, and medicine. Acoustics refers to anything related to sound, while musical acoustics studies sound in music. Sound localization is the ability to locate the source of a sound, while pitch perception is the ability to distinguish between different frequencies of sound.
Psychoacoustics is the study of how humans perceive and interact with sound. Fields of study within psychoacoustics include pitch perception, sound localization, and musical acoustics. The use of psychoacoustics can help sound engineers create more realistic sound space experiences for music, film and concerts. In medicine, psychoacoustics can help medical professionals identify and treat the causes of hearing loss or sound localization malfunction. Tests performed when studying psychoacoustics often look at the nature of sound and the brain activity that occurs in response to sound.
In sound science, acoustics can refer to anything related to sound. In casual conversation, the word acoustic is most often used to refer to the way sound echoes within a room or to refer to an instrument that works without electronic amplification of sound. Musical acoustics is the study of sound in the field of music, studying the activities related to listening, perceiving and performing music. Psychoacoustics involves the interaction between sound and the human brain. A related field, neuromusic, examines the interaction between music and the brain. This includes studying how normal people process music, how people with the disorder process music, and especially how musicians process music, with a specific focus on music training and music memory.
Sound localization is a person’s ability to locate the source of a sound. This part of psychoacoustics studies how a person’s brain uses sounds reaching both ears to determine the location of the sound source. The brain is able to locate a sound source based on the differences between what is heard in each ear due to the position of a person’s head and their ears. Factors that can affect sound localization include the shape of the skull, the space between the person’s ears, and any external environmental echoes.
Pitch perception is the ability to distinguish between different frequencies of sound, which are organized into pitch classes. In music, tones come in groups labeled A through G. An octave is eight whole steps from one A to the next A. Each group of notes contains 12 semitones. A person who can accurately perceive and label pitches without the use of an external instrument such as a tuning fork is said to have perfect intonation. While perfect intonation is useful when playing most instruments, it is most vital when singing and playing instruments such as the trombone or fretless stringed instruments which have no predefined intonation reference points and rely on ability of a musician to play an accurate pitch on his own.
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