Development of a dynamic loudness model including perceptual weights

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Loudness is the perceived intensity of a sound and is an important aspect of hearing. It plays a crucial role when assessing environmental noise. Several standards describe certain aspects of loudness perception. These build on loudness models which are based on hearing experiments with comparatively simple sounds. However, for some environmental sounds, large difference between perception and prediction are observed, especially for sound with strong temporal fluctuations. A reason for this discrepancy may be that not all aspects of loudness perception are included in these approaches. Hearing experiments showed that listeners assign different weights to different portions of the sound. For example, the initial portion of a sound is more important for loudness than later points in time. At present it is unclear if the position of the sound source in space (e.g., in front of the listener or from above) has an impact on loudness. The first aim of the project is to gain a better understanding of how weights are assigned by humans when evaluating the loudness of a sound. The second aim is to develop a new loudness model on the basis of existing data as well as on the data that will be collected in the project. In contrast to present loudness models, this new model will include a specific weighting of different components of the sound when calculating its loudness.