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Description
Sharpness is a well-established psychoacoustic attribute describing high-frequency spectral balance, but current objective measures treat it as a single dimension regardless of tonal content. This study was motivated by whether tonal and noise-like signals give rise to perceptually distinct types of sharpness and whether metrics should accommodate this distinction.Fourteen loudness-matched stimuli (pure tones, harmonic tone complexes, filtered noise, and tone-in-noise mixtures) span a two-dimensional space of sharpness and tonality. Selected pairs are contrasted by their tonal or sharpness content and participants are asked to generate their own descriptive vocabulary through pairwise comparison, then rate every stimulus against their elicited constructs. Constructs pooled across participants are grouped by hierarchical agglomerative clustering and related to standard psychoacoustic metrics for sharpness and tonality.This study contributes to a wider project developing an improved model of psychoacoustic sharpness. The perceptual constructs identified here will inform the model so that it better reflects how sharpness is perceived across signal types.