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Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals

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Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals cover

Critical listening and auditory perception with 18 original narrated audio tracks, an integrated reading companion, and new practice activities.

Course contents

  1. Estimating the Frequency of Sound
  2. Estimation of Sound Level Changes
  3. Estimating Frequency Band Limitations
  4. Frequency Response Irregularities
  5. Judgment of Sound Quality
  6. Detecting Distortion
  7. Reverberation Effects
  8. Signal Versus Noise
  9. Voice Colorations
  10. Listening With Discernment
  11. Loudness, Pitch, and Timbre
  12. How One Sound Masks Another
  13. How the Ear Analyzes Sound
  14. Non-Linearities in the Auditory System
  15. The Perception of Delayed Sounds
  16. Why Some Sounds Are More Pleasant Than Others
  17. How We Locate Sounds
  18. True Binaural Listening

Sample lesson

Estimating the Frequency of Sound

Read the lesson and use its demonstrations

Original narrated listening track

Instruction

Frequency describes cycles per second. An octave doubles frequency. A pure tone concentrates energy at one frequency; noise distributes energy across a band. Build a memory of low, middle, and high frequency regions before attempting precise estimates.

Practice sequence

  • Listen to each announced reference, then pause before the next answer. Write your estimate first. On a second pass, record whether your errors tend to run high or low.
  • Use the original narrated audio for this lesson. Pause before announced answers and record an estimate first.
  • Retest missed comparisons and describe the direction of the error. Keep a comfortable, fixed playback level.

Your assignment

Save a listening log with reference time, first estimate, announced reference, confidence, second attempt and a short account of what improved.

Review points

  • Identify frequency regions without using a spectrum display.
  • Distinguish a tone from narrowband and broadband noise.
  • Keep your first estimates and corrections in the listening log.