Sound for Film and Television, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2

Psychoacoustics

INTRODUCTION

Many issues in human perception of sound are a direct result of the physical acoustics of the head, outer ears, ear canal, and so forth, interacting with sound fields. Although not strictly in the realm of psychoacoustics, this kind of physical acoustics occurs only because a person is present in a sound field, so we will take it up here. The head is a rather large object, acoustically speaking, so there are many interactions between the head and a sound field. A sound wave arriving from the front must “spread around” the head from the front to the sides through diffraction, interact with the outer ear structure principally through reflection, progress down the resonant ear canal to the ear drum, and so ...