psychoacousticsn.
/ˌsʌɪkəʊəˈkuːstɪks/, U.S. /ˌsaɪkoʊəˈkustɪks/ With singular agreement. The branch of science dealing with auditory perception (the perception of sound, including speech).
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the world > health and disease > healing > audiology or audiometry > [noun]
audiometry1885
audiology1946
psychoacoustics1948
the mind > language > linguistics > study of speech sound > [noun] > psychoacoustics
psychoacoustics1948
1948 Mind 57 388 Harvard divided psychology into two Departments—the Department of Social Relations..and the Department of General Psychology, with three..laboratories of General Psychology, Physiological Psychology and Psycho-Acoustics.
1958 New Scientist 30 Oct. 1165/3 The science of acoustics..has branched out into two fields which are essentially modern in idea and purpose... The first field is ultrasonics... The second field is psycho-acoustics, which is, essentially, the study of hearing, but more especially the whole speech-hearing process.
1976 Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 21 i. 2 It would be pointless, e.g., to try to incorporate all of the practically infinite variations of the acoustic wave form into a descriptive system for psycho-acoustics when what is required is an adequate description of those specific properties of the sound pattern which significantly affect the perception of speech.
1991 P. Copeland Sound Recordings (BNC) 71 Ever since then, people have been conducting tests upon different generations of sound recording systems. A complete survey of these would be a fascinating project for a doctorate in psychoacoustics.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, September 2007; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1948