Describe Your Auditory World
Psychoacoustics: 43-2310
Assignment: Describe Your Auditory World
Sitting at the café on the corner of Adams and Michigan, listening to the sounds of a bye-gone era, as noises endeavored all around for your undivided attention. What was happening? A busy café with customers coming and going, people talking, bad coffee brewing and even worse espresso, and machines were working at periodic (criminally sonic) capacity. In the midst of all this extraneous noise, a background music system, (on this occasion music from the 40’s and 50’s like Frank and big band jazz), was trying to entertain us. [A side note; the very idea of background music is that it needs a background with a noise floor that is different (lower) enough from its own level to be unobtrusive. If this is not the case, as is the case with most cafes, then you have a background music system acting like a foreground system. This is never a great idea, in the future I hope to address this professionally]. Hidden from sight somewhere up above was (I believe to be at this point; later I discovered that it was a small rectangular model) a round ceiling speaker. Psychoacoustically I detect that the sound is localized, above me and when I turn my head, my left ear gives me the cue that the sound intensity is greater on that side of the room. Even with all the other noises, the pinna cues are working to help isolate the sound source I am focusing on. When my ears are on axis, (because of what I do know already, one thing being that the source music being played is not only mono but recorded in mono. That being said, I also understand as I focus, that the lower mid-range info is a bit harder to pinpoint because of wavelength) and both ears are facing the same direction it becomes a bit less discernible as to precise location. The sound from the little speaker (firing at a beam two feet in from of it no less) is “ok” sounding, a bit thin with a less than great bandwidth reproduction overall. The
Assignment: Describe Your Auditory World
Sitting at the café on the corner of Adams and Michigan, listening to the sounds of a bye-gone era, as noises endeavored all around for your undivided attention. What was happening? A busy café with customers coming and going, people talking, bad coffee brewing and even worse espresso, and machines were working at periodic (criminally sonic) capacity. In the midst of all this extraneous noise, a background music system, (on this occasion music from the 40’s and 50’s like Frank and big band jazz), was trying to entertain us. [A side note; the very idea of background music is that it needs a background with a noise floor that is different (lower) enough from its own level to be unobtrusive. If this is not the case, as is the case with most cafes, then you have a background music system acting like a foreground system. This is never a great idea, in the future I hope to address this professionally]. Hidden from sight somewhere up above was (I believe to be at this point; later I discovered that it was a small rectangular model) a round ceiling speaker. Psychoacoustically I detect that the sound is localized, above me and when I turn my head, my left ear gives me the cue that the sound intensity is greater on that side of the room. Even with all the other noises, the pinna cues are working to help isolate the sound source I am focusing on. When my ears are on axis, (because of what I do know already, one thing being that the source music being played is not only mono but recorded in mono. That being said, I also understand as I focus, that the lower mid-range info is a bit harder to pinpoint because of wavelength) and both ears are facing the same direction it becomes a bit less discernible as to precise location. The sound from the little speaker (firing at a beam two feet in from of it no less) is “ok” sounding, a bit thin with a less than great bandwidth reproduction overall. The