Psychoacoustics

Choose a listening test

METHOD PAIRWISE

Two sounds, one after the other; the listener says which. Ask that for every pair and a pile of "this one" answers turns into a proper scale, by the same arithmetic that ranks chess players from wins and losses. It never asks anyone for a number, which is what makes it immune to the habits that trouble the method above.

METHOD LIMITS

Change the sound in equal steps in one direction until the listener's answer changes, note where that happened, then do the same thing from the other direction. It is the oldest procedure in the field and the first one taught. The two directions rarely agree, and the gap between them is the second thing it measures.

METHOD ADJUSTMENT

The listener holds the control and moves it until two sounds match, or until something cancels out, then confirms. It is the most natural task here for someone who has never done a listening test, and it is fast, which is why the platform uses it wherever one sound has to be matched to another.

METHOD STAIRCASE

The sound follows the listener: a bit harder after each run of correct answers, a bit easier after a wrong one. Within a few dozen trials it is hovering around the hardest setting the listener can still manage. Most of the limits measured here are measured this way.

METHOD TRACKING

The listener holds a button down for as long as they can hear the sound and lets go when they cannot. Holding makes it quieter, letting go makes it louder again, and meanwhile the pitch drifts slowly upward. The zigzag they trace out is the answer: a whole curve, in four minutes, with no separate measuring step.

METHOD ORDERING

Every item is on one screen and the listener can switch between them freely, as often as they like. They drag them into order, or score each one, or pick just the best and the worst. Five ways of answering, one piece of arithmetic behind them, and it is the method behind almost every blind test of real audio here.

METHOD ANOMALY

One homogeneous sound runs continuously. The software introduces brief events into it near the edge of noticeability, at irregular times, and the listener has one main button: press the moment something actually stands out. The anomaly strength is adjusted separately for each condition, so the result is a curve of how strong the disturbance had to be before it broke through the carrier.

METHOD VIDEO

A short clip is played and the listener says what they got. What makes it a method of its own is that the picture and the sound need not come from the same recording: the platform takes a set of clips and plays one clip's face with another clip's voice. Ask what was heard, then ask the same clips what the mouth said, and the two answers between them say how much each sense moved the other.