ABSTRACT
Psychophysics is concerned with how we perceive the physical stimuli impinging upon our senses. The branch of psychophysics that deals with the perception of sound is psychoacoustics. In defining this term we make a sharp distinction between the physical stimulus and the psychological response to it. We may think of the sound presented to our ears as the stimulus and of what we hear as the response. For example, what we hear as loudness is the perceptual correlate of intensity: Other things being equal, a rise in intensity is perceived as an increase in loudness. Similarly, pitch is the perception related to sound frequency: Other things being equal, pitch gets higher as frequency increases.
