Robert A. Lutfi
Eunmi Oh
Dept. of Commun. Disord. and Psych., Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706
The principles of theoretical acoustics were applied to reconstruct the
sound-pressure waveform at the ear as would be generated by an idealized tuning
fork (struck, clamped bar). The result is an inharmonic sum of damped sinusoids
whose individual acoustic parameters (frequency, intensity, and decay modulus)
are determined by the mass density and elasticity of the material comprising
the bar. In the standard 2IFC procedure, listeners were asked, in effect, to
detect changes in the material composition of the bar based on their perception
of the acoustic waveform. Listener strategies for detecting such changes were
estimated by perturbing slightly the individual acoustic parameters from trial
to trial and computing correlations with the listener's response [cf. R. A.
Lutfi and E. Oh,