# Talk:Sone

## Role of perceived relative loudness

Is it true that humans will rate a sound as twice as loud if the sone level doubles? Or is that property true of phons and not sones? Or is it yet some other property, like pressure wave amplitude, or pressure intensity? Human perception of loudness must scale linearly in proportion to some measure, perhaps as yet to be defined. But whichmeasure?? As far as I can tell, Wikipedia is silent on this. Randallbsmith (talk) 21:35, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

## More useful equations?

The given equation simply relates two rather obscure measures of loudness (${\displaystyle N}$ and ${\displaystyle L_{N}}$.) If it's easy, I'd request the author(s) plop in some other equations as well, relating ${\displaystyle N}$ to more familiar basic physical wave properties (like amplitude, for example). Randallbsmith (talk) 15:59, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

## Sones at 0 dB

Can someone explain how dBs relate to Sones below 40 dB? If an increase of 10 DB is a doubling of Sones, then 30 dB should be .5 Sones, 20 dB should be .25 Sones, 10 dB should be .125 Sones and 0 dB should be .0625 Sones. However the chart says the threshold of sound is 0 Sones, which is understandable if a Sone is a "perceived" sound level -- if you don't hear anything, it would be 0 Sones. If this is the case, how do the numbers map to Sones between 0 dB and 40 dB? How is the perceived level measured or calculated? -- SamuelWantman 09:06, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

That's an excellent point. There's nothing wrong with your calculations, but I think the introduction is slightly misleading. There is no citation that I can see for the mapping of a factor 2 in sones to a 10 dB change in sound level, but my guess is that this mapping breaks down for very low levels of sound, close to the hearing threshold. Thunderbird2 (talk) 09:21, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
I think the part missing from the article is a description of where the sones value comes from. The single number comes from a summation of the sound pressures in each of the frequency bands, and is effected by things like prominent tones that are significantly louder than other sounds in the spectrum, or two prominent tones close to each other, or other spectral situations. Also, which method of calculation was used? Whereas overall sound pressure is a logarithmic summation of numbers (with or without weighting), loudness is much more complicated, and you can't try to equate or correlate dB's with sones. That said, I'm not editing the entry because I don't know what to say. (I know just enough to be dangerous...) --Freqdomain (talk) 14:07, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
More information for computing the loudness for arbitrary sounds can be found in the norm ISO 532 B. This norm also contains a quantitative description of the relationships between the loudness level LN in phon and the loudness N in sone. For 1 kHz sinus signals the loudness level and the sound presure level are identical. According to this norm the following formula is given for loudness levels less than 40 phon or for loudnesses less than 1 sone:
${\displaystyle L_{N}=40({\frac {N}{sone}}+0.0005)^{0.35}{\text{ phon}}}$
${\displaystyle N=(({\frac {L_{N}}{40phon}})^{2.86}-0.0005){\text{ sone}}}$
For these levels a reduction of the sound level by 10 dB leads to a stronger reduction of the loudness than at higer levels. For example:
A loudness level of 30 phon leads to a loudness of 0.44 sone (instead of 0.5 phon)
A loudness level of 20 phon leads to a loudness of 0.14 sone (instead of 0.25 phon)
A loudness level of 10 phon leads to a loudness of 0.018 sone (instead of 0.125 phon)
Skyhead E (talk) 22:17, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

## auditory threshold

auditory threshold at 2 kHz ==> isn't it at 1kHz ?????? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.113.58.88 (talk) 16:37, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

## Lack of References

I found the base page to be very informative, but from other interactions with Wikipedia, I was surprised to find no references for the data provided. When I came to the discussion page, I find out its part of a wikipedia project. Shouldn't that data be documented on the base page in addition to the discussion page? Charles W. Bash (talk) 22:42, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

## Mathematical Symbol?

Thanks for the article! I did notice that the equation to calculate sones from phons is a little confusing. It looks like you use the symbol "ld" for log base 2. You might consider altering that equation. Ben Havrilesko 03 November, 2009 —Preceding undated comment added 22:28, 3 November 2009 (UTC).

## How is the pronounced?

Is it [sɒn] (o as in song) or [soʊn] (o as in bone)? -- Q Chris (talk) 12:30, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

## too technical?

i'm not sure how to flag this article as such, but as a layman, I can't make heads or tails of this... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.16.173.3 (talk) 00:00, 27 August 2013 (UTC)