An Investigation of Perceived and Performed Sound Durations

The aims of this study were to describe the way in which sound durations are perceived, and to attempt to explain the hidden mechanisms of the duration perception in music performances. Three experiments were carried out to determine the difference limen for the perception of sound duration and to find the effects of frequency and intensity on duration discrimination. For short duration tones ranging from 25 to 100 msec, a linear improvement in discrimination judgements was found with increasing duration of signal. The JND was constant for durations between 100 msec and 2 sec. However, for extended stimulus durations (more than 2 sec) the JND was again linearly improved. Subjects were also presented with a pair of stimuli, composed of high and low frequency pure tones, and asked to discriminate differences in duration of the two tones and ignore differences in the frequency of the tones. It was found that subjects perceived the higher frequency to be longer in duration. When an experiment was carried out to investigate the effect of intensity on duration discrimination it was found that a 20 phon difference makes subjects perceive the louder stimulus as longer than the quieter stimulus. Finally, in a performance study, an analysis of musical performances revealed the effect of frequency. It was found that the musicians played the higher notes shorter than the lower notes. This agrees with what was previously found in the work on the perception of tones.