Comparisons of Magnitude Estimation Scaling of Rock Music by Children, Young Adults, and Older People

Abstract

The present study concerned the perceptual processing of complex auditory stimuli in 10 children (M age = 8.1) as compared to 10 young adults (M age = 19.3) and 10 older adult subjects (M age = 54.2). The auditory stimulus used was 10 sec. of rock music (Led Zeppelin, 1969). All three groups provided numerical responses to nine intensities of the rock music stimulus (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 dB above threshold). Analysis showed that the children reported a wider range of numerical responses than both adult groups. The mean numerical responses for the children ranged from .54 to 54.24. For the young adults the range was .76 to 11.37, and for the older subjects it was 1.6 to 23.31. Results suggest that the children were not bound by the same set of rules as the adults with regard to magnitude estimation scaling of the loudness of the rock music stimulus. Their internal scaling mechanisms appeared to be more flexible and broader based than those of the adults who participated in this study.

Psychophysiology and psychoacoustics of music: Perception of complex sound in normal subjects and psychiatric patients

“…In an interesting and well-designed study on the perception of complex sound in schizophrenia and mania [19]; complex nonverbal sounds with 3 s duration were used. They were used instead of music as they are more simple to analyze.…”

A Computerized Multiple-modality Magnitude Estimation System (MMES) for Effective Measurement of Subjective Multidimensional Human Perception

“…Although there have been extensive psychological studies which investigated that there can be systematic interference or effectiveness in the discrimination tasks (Bundesen, 1990;Duncan et al, 1999;Larsen et al, 2003), comparatively few human behavioral studies have revealed correlations between human performance and concurrent modalities in magnitude estimation tasks (Stein et al, 1996). Most of studies in the magnitude estimation tasks have focused on how the individual differences of gender, age, or preference make change on the rating performance of single-modality stimulus (Banks et al, 1994;Ellis, 1999;Fucci and Petrosino,1997;Fucci et al, 1999).…”