Word: phon
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...clangorous world in which municipal antinoise campaigns have attracted wide and favorable attention, most laymen know that a decibel has something to do with the measurement of din, although few could define the term. Meanwhile acousticians have taken up a newer and less well-known unit, the phon, which may well become familiar to laymen because it is even more closely related to the sensibilities of the human ear than the decibel...
Sounds of the same intensity, however, sometimes seem unequally loud to the hearer, especially when they differ in pitch, so the phon was chosen as a unit of loudness. In the British journal Nature last week Dr. George William Clarkson Kaye of the National Physical Laboratory described the phon scale as "a loudness scale which is based on the accepted ability of the average individual to compare and match loudness." Thus, while the decibel is an objective measure of a sound's physical intensity, the phon is a subjective measure of its apparent loudness to the ear. There...