Python Audio Programming

You were the one who said the power must increase 10dB per 10x shrink in timescale.

By this claim a 1fs tone requires 150dB amplification over a 1s tone to be perceptible, and therefore a 1fs pulse at 140dB amplification will not be audible - it will however damage your ears.

No, you're still wrong.

First, you calculated it wrong because you're not actually reading the material. The 10dB per order of magnitude only applies below the critical threshold, which is 200ms to 300ms, not 1 second.

Second, permissible noise exposure is inversely related to the time of noise exposure. Even NIOSH and the CDC say that for every 3dB SPL increase over 85dB your permissible exposure time is cut in half. 112dB is 1 minute, 115dB is 30 seconds, etc. And that's the super-conservative CDC/NIOSH guidelines. Now obviously that isn't perfectly linear all the way down, but it still conveys the message that the actual concern here is the amount of total energy delivered to the ear.



Finally, I'm going to turn the tables on you and use pedantry to my advantage for a change to end this argument once and for all. Let's suppose you are correct, and that I can generate a sufficiently short and loud impulse and send it to your eardrums. And let's suppose that this pulse has sufficient energy to destroy your eardrum!

If you were hit with such a powerful pulse that did damage your body in some way, would you not perceive that? Surely you would hear something as your ear fails due to all of that energy sent to it. Therefore, even infinitely short pulses with insane amounts of energy are perceptible. And the failure of your ear due to a huge energy spike is going to produce some sort of vibration somewhere in your ear. Therefore, we can even say that it's audible. :D
 
To be honest none of these acoustic models can in good faith be extrapolated down to infinitesimal timescales as they are so far removed from any actual data at that point.

Which is to say we have essentially no data. There is also a huge psychoacoustic and neurocognitive components which are at play.

I personally have no idea what happens when your eardrums blow. I can imagine you might "hear" ringing after the fact.


Let's be honest this was a pretty stupid conversation.
 
@serpretetsky still working on it. This whole thing is new ground for me so it might take some time. Also I have to juggle this with all the other projects I am working on. I also started thinking about using different type of waves like square, triangle and sawtooth.
 
I see, before this thread got derailed I was still curious what you were trying to do. You want each letter to represent a specific frequency (note)?

Something like:
"A B C" -> 1 second note @ 400Hz, 1 second note @ 800Hz, 1 second note @ 900Hz (just example)
 
Now that I understand a little bit more maybe I can explain this better. What I wanted to do was assign a letter to a wave, sine, square, etc. Each letter would represent a different amplitude with "A" being the lowest non zero amplitude level up to "Z" being the highest. There were other ideas given in this thread that I will try out as well such as the touch tone example using frequency. This is probably a project I will work on for some time just because it very interesting and there is some to learn from it.
 
Now that I understand a little bit more maybe I can explain this better. What I wanted to do was assign a letter to a wave, sine, square, etc. Each letter would represent a different amplitude with "A" being the lowest non zero amplitude level up to "Z" being the highest. There were other ideas given in this thread that I will try out as well such as the touch tone example using frequency. This is probably a project I will work on for some time just because it very interesting and there is some to learn from it.
Just to make sure we're on the same page: amplitude means loudness. So you want A be very very quiet and Z to be very very loud. Is this correct?
 
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