ABSTRACT
Unlike other senses, it is surprising how limited our vocabulary is when talking about hearing.1 Especially in the audio industry, we do not often discriminate between subjective and objective quantities. For instance, the quantities of frequency, level, spectrum, etc. are all objective, in a sense that they can be measured with a meter or an electronic device; whereas the concepts of pitch, loudness, timbre, etc. are subjective, and they are auditory perceptions in our heads. Psychoacoustics investigates these subjective quantities (i.e., our perception of hearing), and their relationship with the objective quantities in acoustics. Psychoacoustics got its name from a field within psychology-i.e., recognition science-which deals with all kinds of human perceptions, and it is an interdisciplinary field of many areas, including psychology, acoustics, electronic engineering, physics, biology, physiology, computer science, etc.
