Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models Eberhard Zwicker and Hugo Fastl Springer-Verlag, New York, 1999 [1990]. 2nd edition. $64.95 (416 pp.). ISBN 3-540-65063-6
Upon his retirement, Eberhard Zwicker wrote Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models in collaboration with Hugo Fastl, his colleague of many years. The book was published as 1990 began. Later that year, on 22 November 1990, Zwicker died at his home near Munich, Germany—a great loss to the hearing research community.
Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models was Zwicker’s last statement—a summary of the things that had interested him and had been studied in his labs over the years. The list is long: psychoacoustical measures of masking as related to excitation patterns, tuning curves, and temporal effects, in addition to loudness, roughness, subjective duration, nonlinear distortion, binaural effects, and pitch perception for pure and complex tones—including the unusual topic of pitch strength.
The second edition of Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models is very similar to the first. A modest amount of new data and references has been added on pitch strength and roughness and on applications. The number of figures has increased by 5%. The greater number of pages in the second edition results mainly from larger type.
The book’s introductory chapters include the standard auditory physiology, emphasizing the active cochlea and supplemented with a useful, and still current, introduction to Zwicker’s last passion, otoacoustic emissions. The book ends with applications to noise control, audiology, and sound quality—areas in which Fastl is an acknowledged world authority.
Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models is a unique book. It makes no attempt to provide a balanced approach to its subject matter. Essentially 100% of the literature cited in the 42 pages of references is from the Zwicker labs in Stuttgart and Munich. For American readers, this is not necessarily a bad thing; it serves to focus a spotlight on much work that is not well known. German titles are given English translations in the list of references.
Like other books on the topic, Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models is filled with data on human hearing. However, it is often difficult for the reader to know what these data represent. Some data appear to come from only one or two experienced listeners. Other results that appear to be data may be only the predictions of models. For instance, it would be impossible actually to measure the highly-structured plot of direct masking by a complex periodic tone as shown in chapter 4, but an inexperienced reader would not know that. Sometimes the presentation misses interesting effects because it relies on inadequate experiments. For instance, the treatment of the pitch of noise band edges somehow missed the pitch shift in the direction of higher spectral density.
The difficulty in interpretation is compounded by a referencing technique that gives all the references at the end of the book in blocks that correspond to chapters or major sections. No specific connections are made between the facts and models in the chapters and the references.
The other side of this coin is that Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models never presents data without a great deal of thought and sense of purpose. Data are chosen to demonstrate the operation of basic perceptual models. The models are based on a few elementary principles such as critical-band filtering, critical-band independence, specific loudness, and modulation transfer functions. It is of great value to see how far a rigorous and systematic application of these fundamental ideas can go in explaining the richness of human auditory experience, and this is the special significance of Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models. Readers who do not have the first edition of Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models would do well to get the second.
