Timeline for Why do we use decibels instead of just using intensity to measure how loud things are?
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| Sep 27, 2017 at 16:15 | comment | added | Rococo | In addition, I am rather confused about the exponent of 0.67 listed on that wikipedia page. As I showed, the exponent that one gets from this rule is about 0.3, which is also the one listed on the page for 'sone.' So I am not sure where this is coming from. | |
| Sep 27, 2017 at 16:15 | comment | added | Rococo | @Communisty Well, as you can see the frequency dependence is complicated. I imagine that people have made various analytical approximations to this curve, but they would be messy and would not necessarily give much additional insight. You (or the OP) might be able to find more knowledgeable people about aspects like this in another stack exchange that deals more with the biological side of this question, such as Cognitive Science or Audio Design. | |
| Sep 27, 2017 at 7:21 | vote | accept | Dahen | ||
| Sep 27, 2017 at 7:20 | comment | added | Dahen | Yeah, I can see that. my question was intended to just cover the kind of "middle" range of the audible frequencies , in which case his answer is more correct than Victor's. Though honestly this makes me wonder, aside from making numbers look cleaner and more usable, what's the point of the decibel scale? | |
| Sep 27, 2017 at 7:17 | comment | added | Communisty | As I understood your critic @Rococo: Alfred Centauri isn't right and his rule is just an artifact, Victor Storm probably isn't right as loudness isn't logarithmic but a power law. It is a power law according to Stephen's power law and also varies with frequency. Power law wikipedia page gives only the power of 0.67 for 3000Hz. Is there functions that would give loudness on this power law as a function of both deciBells and frequency? | |
| Sep 27, 2017 at 7:15 | comment | added | Rococo | @Dahen Alfred's answer is a good rule of thumb for the middle of the auditory range (the book he links to emphasizes this). However, you can see from the graph that at 30 Hz, going from 80 to 90 decibels will actually increase the perceived sound by a factor of four, not a factor of two. | |
| Sep 27, 2017 at 7:08 | comment | added | Dahen | I see, so that means AlfredCantauri's answer is correct, right? Since the sone-to-dB table On the wiki page implies that. Alright, thanks for clearing up everything, much appreciated. | |
| Sep 27, 2017 at 7:05 | history | edited | Rococo | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 27, 2017 at 6:57 | history | edited | Rococo | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 27, 2017 at 6:47 | history | edited | Rococo | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 27, 2017 at 6:41 | comment | added | Rococo | Hi @Dahen, please see my edit which corrects a major initial misunderstanding I had. My current understanding is simply that sound perception does not scale in a logarithmic way, and that the use of decibels is basically just a historical artifact. | |
| Sep 27, 2017 at 6:39 | history | edited | Rococo | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 27, 2017 at 6:20 | comment | added | Dahen | So to answer my original question, I WILL perceive a 40 dB sound (around 3000 Hz so to not go the extremes) to be twice as loud as a 20dB one with the same frequency, right? The other sources I tried looking at also say what @AlfredCentauri is saying, but I'm not sure if those were talking about subjective human-perceived loudness or actual physical volume | |
| Sep 27, 2017 at 6:06 | history | answered | Rococo | CC BY-SA 3.0 |