A Microcomputer Based Facility for Psychoacoustic Experimentation

摘要

A microcomputer based experimental facility was developed to investigate the effects of wearing hearing protection on the perception of warning sounds. The microcomputer acts as a process controller and a data logger. The facility is capable of presenting complex sound stimuli to subjects from cassette tape recordings, or pure tones generated by a synthesizer. The intensities of the sound stimuli and a background noise can be separately varied over a 70 dB range. The facility also includes a range of loading tasks derived from a television game integrated circuit chip. During the course of an experiment the computer controls the time of presentation and intensity of the sound stimuli, and the operation of the loading task. It also logs data of the presentation of the sound stimuli, the subject's responses to the stimuli, and the subject's performance at the loading task. It is possible to analyze the data using the microcomputer or by feeding it via paper tape to other computers.