Hi everybody,
This is probably off-topic, but someboy out there might find this interesting. Here's my problem: I've noticed that when I have music playing on at a medium-loud volume on my headphones, and then take them off while the music keeps playing, the pitch I hear coming from the 'phones sags by as much as a quarter-tone compared to when I had them on my head. Is this just me, or has anyone else noticed it too?
I haven't seen this illusion dealt with in any of the psychoacoustics material I've read (granted, that's not saying much), and nobody I know has spoken of it, so can anyone tell me why it's happening?
Here are my hypotheses, and why I think they're all false:
1) "It's just a Doppler shift caused my the motion of my headphones away from my head." This is false because the pitch-sag persists even when I'm holding the headphones still.
2) "It's a psychoacoustic relation between volume and pitch." This still may be partially true, but turning the volume up and down on my loudspeakers has no effect on the pitch. I noticed, however, that headphone pitch-sag is most noticable when the music is played at louder volumes.
Anyway, it's something I've been curious about for a while, so I'd be interested to hear someone's explanation.
-Peter
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