Tonal Annoyance vs. Tonal Loudness and Tonality

Quantifying tonalities in technical sounds according to human perception is a task of growing importance. The psychoacoustic tonality method, published in the 15th edition of the ECMA-74 standard, is a new method based on a model of human hearing according to Sottek that can calculate the perceived tonality of a signal. In the past, many listening experiments have been performed asking for the tonality of the presented sounds. The results showed that participants may evaluate tonal annoyance instead of tonal loudness; there is a distinction between these two perceptions. In general, tonal loudness is regarded as strongly correlated with tonality. It could be assumed that the tonal annoyance will increase at higher frequencies for equal-loudness tones, e. g., due to higher sharpness values. New listening experiments were performed to compare the frequency-dependent differences between equal-tonal-loudness contours and equal-tonal-annoyance contours for different phon values. This article describes the results of the listening experiments and explains how the hearing model can be used to predict the experimental data. This is an essential step for the definition of targets with respect to tonality.