Human merging frequency and upper hearing threshold

Principle

The hearing range depends greatly on age. While tones above the upper acoustic threshold are not perceived at all, individual sounds under the lower hearing threshold are perceived as a continuous deep tone (merging).

Benefits

• Exciting experiment for all age groups
• Simple experiment setup consisting of a versatile function generator and headphones
• Can be used to perform a medical survey of different age groups

Tasks

1. Determine the merging frequency and upper acoustic threshold of test subjects of various ages.
2. Stimulate the ear with tones at the lower and upper acoustic threshold using a sine wave generator and headphones.

Learning objectives

• Acoustic hearing thresholds
• Merging frequency
• Hearing range
• Sine wave generator
• Medical survey