Contribution
Investigation of auditory memory through loudness reproduction in the laboratory
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Previous studies suggest that environmental sounds reproduced in the laboratory are perceived as louder than in the original context, challenging the ecological validity of laboratory experiments for which the perceived loudness is expected to be a crucial factor. To estimate the size of such a bias, we conducted a listening experiment in both field and lab. In detail, 31 participants visited a street and listened to the environmental sounds for one minute, while these sounds were also recorded using a dummy head. Thereafter, they listened to that specific binaural recording via headphones in a quiet laboratory nearby and adjusted its level as they remembered it. Half of the sample did this immediately, the other half about 20 minutes after the sound exposure. Preliminary results confirm a mean bias towards lower reconstruction levels of about 8.8 dB that were not significantly affected by neither the actual loudness nor the time between recording and level reconstruction. Analyses further suggest that participants noise sensitivity (as opposed to age, gender, musicality, or previous experience with acoustics) had a moderate effect on bias magnitude. Implications for the plausibility of reproduction levels in listening experiments will be discussed.