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Principles of Psychoacoustics

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Abstract

Psychoacoustics is the science of sound perception, i.e., investigating the statistical relationships between acoustic stimuli and hearing sensations [51]. This study aims to build up the psychoacoustic model, a kind of quantitative model, which could closely match the hearing mechanism. A good understanding of the sensory response of the human auditory system (HAS) is essential to the development of psychoacoustic models for audio watermarking, where the perceptual quality of processed audio must be preserved to the greatest extent.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this sense, the auditory canal closed with the eardrum at its proximal end has a configuration as a resonator.

  2. 2.

    Acoustic impedance is a constant related to the propagation of sound waves in an acoustic medium. Technically, sound waves encounter much less resistance when travelling in air than in fluid.

  3. 3.

    Note that the cochlea is a cavity within the skull, not a structure by itself [58]. Hence the unraveled cochlea in Fig. 2.3b is impossible in practice, only for the sake of illustration.

  4. 4.

    The hair cells including the outer and inner hair cells (OHC and IHC) are auditory receptors on the organ of corti.

  5. 5.

    There is one fact worth of attention, i.e., any location on the BM will respond to a wide range of tones that are lower than its CF. That’s why low frequencies are less selective than high frequencies.

  6. 6.

    The whole length of 32 mm basilar membrane divided by 24 critical bands is 1.3 mm for each band.

  7. 7.

    Here, narrowband means the bandwidth equal to or smaller than a critical band.

  8. 8.

    Hereafter, this rule does apply to all the graphs in Sect. 2.3.

  9. 9.

    For illustration, all the curves are shifted upward to the masker’s SPL (60 dB).

  10. 10.

    ISO: International Organization for Standardization; IEC: International Electrotechnical Committee; MPEG: Moving Picture Experts Group.

  11. 11.

    The frequency edges are calculated based on the sampling frequency F s .

  12. 12.

    Critical band boundaries vary with the Layer and sampling frequency. ISO/IEC IS 11172-3 [77] has tabulated such parameters in Table D.2a–f. In our case, Table D.2b for Layer I at a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz is adopted.

  13. 13.

    The geometric mean of a data set \(\left [a_{1},a_{2},\ldots,a_{M}\right ]\) is defined as \(\left (\prod _{m=1}^{M}a_{m}\right )^{1/M}\). It is sometimes called the log-average, i.e., \(\left (\prod _{m=1}^{M}a_{m}\right )^{1/M} = 10^{{\hat{}{}}}\left [ \frac{1} {M}\sum _{m=1}^{M}\log _{ 10}\left (a_{m}\right )\right ]\).

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Lin, Y., Abdulla, W.H. (2015). Principles of Psychoacoustics. In: Audio Watermark. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07974-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07974-5_2

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