Abstract
Critical bandwidth represents a very basic magnitude in psychoacoustics. Many hearing sensations like pitch, loudness and timbre are easily described when transforming the physical frequency scale into the psychophysical critical band rate scale. The usefulness of the critical band concept has been proposed and confirmed in many reviews of psychoacoustics (e.g. Zwicker and Feldtkeller, 1967; Scharf, 1970; Zwicker, 1975; Plomp, 1976; Moore, 1982; Zwicker, 1982). As a database for the critical bandwidth, the classic paper by Zwicker, Flottorp and Stevens (1957) is usually referenced, in which also the critical band is correlated to the concept of the critical ratio as proposed by Fletcher (1940) and others. In an international committee of ISO, the numerical values of critical bands were agreed upon and published by Zwicker (1961). For these numerical values of the critical band, Zwicker and Terhardt (1980) suggested analytical expressions in order to facilitate the incorporation of the critical band concept into computer models of hearing. An alternative formula was suggested by Moore and Glasberg (1983), describing the equivalent rectangular bandwidth, ERB. The ERB is based on a symmetric auditory filter as derived by Patterson (1976) from masking experiments with notched-noise maskers. A detailed description of the ERB-concept is given in Patterson et al. (1982); the formula of Moore and Glasberg (1983) was fitted to notched-noise data of Fidell et al. (1983), Patterson (1976), Patterson et al. (1982) and Weber (1977).
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© 1986 Plenum Press, New York
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Fastl, H., Schorer, E. (1986). Critical Bandwidth at Low Frequencies Reconsidered. In: Moore, B.C.J., Patterson, R.D. (eds) Auditory Frequency Selectivity. Nato ASI Series, vol 119. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2247-4_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2247-4_34
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