1.

Explain loudness, pitch and timbre

Loudness: sound intensity (or sound pressure) measured close
to eardrum.
Depends on amplitude measured in decibels
The greater the amplitude, the louder the sound perceived.
3 Factors affecting loudness:
- Frequency of content
- Duration
- Context in which it is presented
Pitch: perceptual correlate of waveform periodicity, or repetition
rate
- Varies over time
- Provides basis of melody for most types of music
- Provide important prosodic information in non-tone languages
- Help to define the meaning of the words in non-tone
languages
Pitch are harmonic because the frequencies are all integer
multiples of a common fundamental frequency.
Timbre: quality of sound and often described using words such
as dull, bright, harsh and hollow.
- Depends on the complexity of a sound wave
- Distinguish two sounds that have same loudness, pitch and
duration.
- Important aspect of timbre: spectral content of sound &
temporal envelope of the sound
Higher frequency energy brighter, tinnier or harsher than sounds
with more low-frequency content

figure 1

*depends on the wavelength

2. Briefly describe the structure of the auditory system and

functions of the various parts.

Figure 2

Outer ear
Pinna : filtering produced by them help to localize sounds and
resolve potential front-back and up-down confusions.
- Folds and bumps produce distinct peaks and dips in the
frequency response that depend on the location of the sound
source.
-

Ear canal: a tube that amplifies sound in the region from about 14 kHz (particularly important for speech communication)

Middle ear: air-filled cavity, membrane-lined space located

between the ear canal and the Eustachian tube, cochlea and
auditory nerve.
Function:
- To transmit the vibrations from the tympanic membrane (ear
drum) to oval window of the cochlea
- To better match the impedance of the air surrounding the
tympanic membrane with that of the fluid within the cochlea

Inner ear:
Cochlea
mechanical vibrations of sound are transduced into neural
signals processed by brains
spiral-shaped structure that is filled with fluid
Basilar Membrane
Vibrates in response to the pressure differences produced by
vibrations of the oval window.
Organ of Corti
Runs the entire basilar membrane from the base to the apex
Includes three rows of outer hair cells and one row of
the inner hair cells
Hair cells: sense vibrations by way of their tiny cells or streoncilla
Outer: to function mechanically amplify the sound-induced
vibrations
Inner: form synapses with the auditory nerve and traduced
those vibrations into action potentials (transmitted along the
auditory nerve to higher centers of auditory pathways)
What are we really hearing?
- Hearing sound frequencies

What do tests of dichotic listening and overlapping images tell us about our attention?

Dichotic listening:
-

Different audio streams are presented to each ear.

People are asked to monitor one stream while ignoring the other.

Overlapping images:
-

When partially transparent images of events are placed are combined.

We are deaf to the substance of the ignored speech

o Cognitive deafness due to the nature of focused, selective attention
o We will be unaware to events happening outside the focus of our attention even
when looking right at them.
We may notice (about one-third of the time) if our names are mentioned on the side we are
ignoring as we still devote some of our limited attention to the ignored speech stream.
o Selective listening
A method for studying selective attention in which people focus attention on
one auditory stream of information while deliberately ignoring other
auditory information.
Highlights the power of attention to filter extraneous(irrelevant) information
from awareness while letting in only those elements of our world that we
want to hear

What is inattentional blindness? Describe a typical inattentional blindness study.

Inattentional blindness:
Failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected, object or event when attention is
devoted to something else.

Example of a typical Inattentional blindness study:

1. Subjects were asked to watch a video of two teams of players, one wearing white
shirts and one wearing black shirts.
2. The players moved in and around each other and were fully visible.
3. The subjects were then asked to count the ball passes made by the team in white.
While the players were moving about in the video, they had a woman in a gorilla suit
walk into the scene, stop to face the camera, thump her chest, and then walk off the
other side after nine seconds on screen.
4. Fully half the observers missed the gorilla when counting the ball passes made by
the team in white.

What is inattentional deafness? How is it tested?

Inattentional deafness:
The auditory analog of inattentional blindness.
People fail to notice an unexpected sound or voice when attention is devoted to other aspects
of a scene.

The greater demands on attention, or the more distracted we are, the less likely people are
aware of their surroundings.
o We effectively develop tunnel vision (defective sight in which objects cannot be
properly seen if not close to the center of the field of view)

It is tested by letting the subjects listen to a set of spatially localized conversations over
headphones. There will be a voice of a person walking through the scene repeatedly stating I
am a gorilla. People often fail to notice.
o Under conditions of focused attention, we see and hear less of the unattended
information.

Thought question for you: What would you say are the implications of inattentional
blindness on multi-tasking?
It limits our ability to multi-task. We may think we can multi-tasking but in fact we cannot do so.
When we put our focus on something, we tend to neglect our surroundings. We may be able to
multi-task if we spread out our attention evenly and increase our awareness of our
surroundings?

Talking on a phone while driving or walking decreases situation awareness and increases the
chances that people will miss something important. In a dramatic illustration of cell phone
induced inattentional blindness, Ira Hymen observed that people talking on a cell phone as they
walked across a college campus were less likely than other pedestrians to notice a unicycling
clown who rode across their path.