Using Audacity for Demonstrations of Psychoacoustical Principles

Abstract

This article contains both basic and advanced tutorial demonstrations, created with Audacity software, designed to teach psychoacoustical principles to undergraduate students enrolled in courses such as Sensation and Perception. The demonstrations illustrate concepts such as the relationships between physical characteristics of sine waves (e.g., frequency, amplitude, and phase) and perception, the human hearing range, dissonance, complex tones and additive synthesis, perception of the missing fundamental frequency, auditory localization cues, and timbre. The present article also includes discussion of a study evaluating the effectiveness of these demonstrations in teaching psychoacoustical concepts. Specifically, this study revealed a statistically significant benefit of performing these demonstrations over simply experiencing the same phenomena in a lecture setting. Finally, this article offers suggestions for additional demonstrations that instructors may wish to perform.