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Volume Setting

Running auditory experiments online? This new volume setting procedure will help you and your participants set their sound volume to a given sound level.

If you want to add this to your Pavlovia study, use this website to AUTOMATICALLY implement this task in Pavlovia and PsychoJS.

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SoundVolumeSetting

Built with Task Builder 1

  • Participants are asked to set the computer's volume to about 50% and then click "play" to hear the pulsed noise played on a continuous loop.
  • Stimuli: a 1-second Gaussian white noise was generated, band-pass filtered between 80-8000 Hz, and adjusted to achieve a nominal RMS level of 0.000399. 100-ms cosine ramps were added to both ends of the noise, so when it played on a continuous loop without gaps, it would sound like a sequence of gentle noise bursts.
  • Participants are instructed to use the computer’s volume setting buttons to adjust the volume to a level at which the noise was barely audible
  • Specific instructions directed participants to slowly lower the volume until they could no longer hear the noise, and then to increase the volume a very small amount until they could again just barely hear the noise.

Across a set of three experiments conducted in person, we demonstrate the stability and robustness of this volume setting procedure both ‘in the wild’ (yes, literally outdoors) and in controlled settings. See our paper for more details.

Gorilla Open Materials Attribution-NonCommerical Research-Only


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Preferred Citation Zhao, S., Brown, C. A., Holt, L. L., & Dick, F. (2021). Robust and efficient online auditory psychophysics with the right auditory hygiene. BioRxiv.
https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.17.452796
Conducted at Birkbeck College, University of London; Carnegie Mellon University; University of Oxford; University of Pittsburgh
Published on 20 July 2021
Corresponding author Dr Sijia Zhao Post-doc
Experimental Psychology
University of Oxford