Psychoacoustic Audio Perception

Cluster focuses on psychoacoustic effects like missing fundamental, beat frequencies, harmonics, phase alignment, and spectrum analysis explaining why people perceive sounds as dissonant, consonant, or indistinguishable in audio demos.

➡️ Stable 0.5x Science
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#7068
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Keywords

audiometrics.com OP s.t wikipedia.org FWIW youtube.com imgur.com vocaroo.com audiocheck.net i.e frequency hear frequencies musician sound pitch ear audio music peaks

Sample Comments

tgv Apr 20, 2025 View on HN

That has a lot of overtones. If this is truly based on some weird psycho-acoustic effect, a piano tone might not work.

Houshalter Dec 22, 2013 View on HN

If I understand correctly, it's because the frequency it is listening to is much higher than normal music. Also possibly because the algorithm is meant to deal with noise.

CamperBob2 Jun 6, 2020 View on HN

Get an audio spectrum analyzer app for your phone, and enable its log-X scale. Very useful for this sort of thing. The FFT will reveal sounds you don't hear yourself.

TonyTrapp Jun 25, 2020 View on HN

You are probably observing the missing fundamental phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental

tomc1985 Jan 9, 2015 View on HN

Why haven't they attempted to visualize the audio? Side-by-side FFT comparisons would show any differences pretty quickly

import Oct 19, 2020 View on HN

Same, there is a weird sine wave with high pitch and frequency.

onnodigcomplex Oct 19, 2019 View on HN

Interesting, I still hear it the same, dissonant and consonant, perhaps western music ruined me. Thanks for sharing.Edit: Didn't see the url, makes my old reply obsolete:Interesting. I tried to avoid clipping/aliasing by using audacity with as high quality audio as my system allows and I can still reproduce pretty much exactly what you hear on those websites. https://vocaroo.com/i/

mondoshawan Apr 15, 2018 View on HN

It's widely claimed, but most folks can't hear it because the rhythm is totally wrong. Listen to high low freq shifts instead.

HPsquared Mar 27, 2024 View on HN

Maybe it has something to do with phase. If they are ever so slightly out of tune, the phase is kind of "smeared" out, whereas with "exactly in tune" the locked phase can affect the timbre.

codezero Jun 25, 2020 View on HN

Sounds like you were generating a beat frequency, pretty neat :)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)