A Study on the Human Auditory Scaling

인간의 청각 척도에 관한 고찰

Human beings can perceive various aspects of sound including loudness, pitch, length, and timber. Recently many studies were conducted to clarify complex auditory scales of the human ear. This study critically reviews some of these scales (decibel, sone, phon for loudness perception; mel and bark for pitch) and proposes to apply the scales to normalize acoustic correlates of human speech. One of the most important aspects of human auditory perception is the nonlinearity which should be incorporated into the linear speech analysis and synthesis system. Further studies using more sophisticated equipment are desirable to refine these scales, through the analysis of human auditory perception of complex tones or speech. This will lead scientists to develop better speech recognition and synthesis devices.