Development of a new loudness model in consideration of audio-visual interaction

Recently, several researchers have been focusing on loudness perception of sound sources when the sounds are presented with the appearance of what radiates them. They concluded the visual information may increase/decrease the perceived loudness intensity. However, because these works concentrated mostly on subjective evaluation of actual sounds, there is a demand for an objective loudness model in consideration of the audio-visual interaction. Due to this reason, this paper focuses on its development. First of all, a new equal loudness curve considering the color effect is proposed for a limited frequency band based on experimental results of audio-visual stimuli consisting of sinusoidal sounds and color patches. Secondly, this function is applied to the loudness calculation to correct the effect of colors, whereas, the other computation processes are the same as a conventional loudness model of ISO532B. This is because it is considered that the mechanism of sound perception is not affected by colors but by our ear structures. Finally, several audio-visual stimuli are evaluated and the result is compared to result analyzed by the new loudness model using the corresponding conditions and the model accuracy is discussed.