Miskiewicz

et al.: Roughness of two simultaneous pure tones

ACTA ACUSTICA UNITED WITH ACUSTICA

Vol. 92 (2006)

Figure 3. Synopsis of beat rates producing maximal roughness,

dissonance, or unpleasantness, plotted as a function of the centre frequency of a pure-tone dyad. Data from the present study
(closed circles) and from the literature (open symbols).

Figure 1. Roughness as a function of the beat rate of a pure- tone

dyad. Group results obtained by absolute magnitude estimation.
Plotted are the geometric means of 70 estimates (7 listeners 10
estimates). Each panel shows the data for one center frequency.
The data have been normalized such that the maximal geometric
mean for a given centre frequency equals 1.

Figure 2. Beat rates producing maximal roughness, plotted as a

function of the centre frequency of a pure-tone dyad. Filled circles show the group results; open symbols indicate the maxima
obtained for seven individual listeners. For clarity, some symbols
are slightly shifted to the left or to the right.

In Figure 2, the group roughness maxima replotted from

Figure 1 (lled circles) are compared with individual maxima obtained for each listener (unlled symbols). For clarity of presentation, some data points are slightly shifted

to the left or to the right. As seen in Figure 2, the beat

rate that yields maximum roughness considerably diers
across listeners, however, for most listeners the beat rate
that produces maximum roughness increases with the centre frequency of the dyad.
The present nding that the beat rate producing maximal roughness increases with the centre frequency of a
dyad is in agreement with previous studies of roughness
[1] as well as with studies in which the sensation elicited
by two simultaneous pure tones was judged for dissonance
and for unpleasantness [1, 7, 8]. To compare the beat rates
that yielded the maximal sensations of roughness, dissonance, and unpleasantness in various studies, the roughness maxima from Figure 1 and those from the literature
have been plotted on a common graph in Figure 3. In some
of the experiments [1, 7, 8] the sensation magnitude was
manipulated in such a way that the frequency of the lower
tone of a dyad was kept constant and only the frequency
of the upper tone was varied. In such a case, the beat rates
that yielded maximum sensation values were given for the
lower tone frequency rather than for the centre frequency
of a dyad. To enable a comparison of data from dierent
experiments, all maxima of sensation magnitudes compiled in Figure 3 have been plotted as a function of the
centre frequency of a dyad.
Among the experiments compared in Figure 3, the only
ones in which the listeners were explicitly instructed to
judge roughness were the present experiment and that of
Plomp and Steeneken [1]. Figure 3 shows that the roughness maxima obtained in the present study (closed circles)
and those reported by Plomp and Steeneken (open circles) agree very closely within a range of centre frequencies from 125 to 1000 Hz. At centre frequencies above
1000 Hz, the beat rates that produce maximal roughness
are higher in Plomp and Steenekens experiment than in
the present experiment, by 70% at 2000 Hz and 101% at
4000 Hz. One possible reason for such a discrepancy between the roughness maxima at high centre frequencies

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