Loudness

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Related to Loudness: loudness unit, Loudness war

loudness

[′lau̇d·nəs]

(acoustics)

The magnitude of the physiological sensation produced by a sound, which varies directly with the physical intensity of sound but also depends on frequency of sound and waveform.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Loudness

a quantity that characterizes auditory sensations for a given sound. Loudness depends in a complex way on sound pressure (or sound intensity), frequency, and form of vibrations. Where frequency and form of vibrations are constant, loudness increases with an increase in sound pressure. Where sound pressure is the same, the loudness of pure tones (harmonic oscillations) of different frequencies is different—that is, at different frequencies sounds of different intensity can have the same loudness. The loudness of a given frequency is evaluated by comparing it with the loudness of a simple tone of 1.000 hertz (Hz) frequency. The sound pressure level (in decibels [dB]) of a pure tone of 1,000 Hz frequency that is as loud (audially) as the tone being measured is called the loudness level of the given sound (in phons). Loudness for complex sounds is rated on an arbitrary scale in sones. Loudness is an important characteristic of musical sound.

loudness

The intensive attribute of an auditory sensation, in terms of which sounds may be rank-ordered on a scale extending from soft to loud; depends primarily on sound pressure, but also on the frequency and wave form of the sound stimulus; expressed in units called sones; 2 sones is just twice as loud as 1 sone.

Loudness

boiler factory

proverbial source of noise and confusion. [Am. Culture: Misc.]

breaking of the sound barrier

boom of plane heard exceeding speed of about 750 m.p.h. or Mach 1. [Aviation: Misc.]

Concorde

supersonic jet of British-French design. [Eur. Hist.: EB, III: 66]

Joshua

Jericho walls razed by clamorous blasts from his troops’ trumpets. [O.T.: Joshua 6]

Krakatoa

volcanic explosion on this Indonesian island heard 3000 miles away (1883). [Asian Hist.: NCE, 1500]

Olivant

Roland’s horn, whose blast kills birds and is heard by Charlemagne, eight miles away. [Fr. Legend: Brewer Dictionary, 772]

sonic boom

shock wave from plane breaking the speed of sound. [Aviation: Misc.]

Stentor

Greek herald with voice of 50 men. [Gk. Myth.: Espy, 39]

References in periodicals archive ?

Classification of vocal quality including pitch and loudness showed no difference between groups, with children with typical language development (G3) showing more alterations.

Characteristics of the emissive prosody of children with autism spectrum disorder

The unique audio characteristics, in terms of channel configuration, dynamics, frequency range and SPL, presented by those devices require customised loudness adaptation that needs to be based on more sophisticated technologies than the ones we have been using in the past decade.

Adapting loudness in the multicasting scenario

Psychoacoustic metrics are widely used to represent human perceptions of various sounds, and actually some of the most used ones, for example the loudness and sharpness, have already been standardized for routine uses.

Psychoacoustic analysis of gear noise with gear faults

In this realm of loudness, anyone who attempts to express an alternate viewpoint in a calm voice is quickly lost.

Al-Sisi's fans--being loud is not necessarily being right

(1) Perceived loudness of individual sound or sound category (PLS): the mean of all the perceived loudness scores of a sound provided by a group of observers using the same pre-defined rating scale (five-point linear scale from "very quiet" to "very loud" in this study).

SOUNDSCAPE DESIGN IN CITY PARKS: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOUNDSCAPE COMPOSITION PARHMETERS AND PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOACOUSTIC PARAMETERS

Further psychoacoustic transformations are applied: Computation of the Phon scale incorporates equal loudness curves, which account for the different perception of loudness at different frequencies.

Indexing and retrieval of speech using perceptual linear prediction and sonogram

Researchers also predicted the loudness of a summer's day in an alternate universe without people (below).

A cacophony of sounds on a summer's day

To assess the loudness of tinnitus, patients were asked to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10.

Effect of low-level laser therapy in the treatment of cochlear tinnitus: a double-blind, placebo-controlled study

My acoustics class (54 students) was engaged to vocalize repeated "yea" and "nay" responses with different group sizes and different (but controlled) loudnesses. There was also a systematic variation of the words used: yes, no, yea, nay, aye.

Making decisions by voice voting

The distress associated with tinnitus shows closer relation with factors related to emotional health as depression, anxiety, and somatic symptom severity than with the loudness of the tinnitus [2].

Reminding us of the direct criticisms that President Ivanov sent to the EU, Erol Rizaov adds in Utrinski vesnik that if he wanted to achieve greater loudness in Europe, the president should have spoken publically about his own credibility.

Europe's shame and reputation

In the US, this is known as the CALM Act (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation).