PSYCHOACOUSTICS-WEB: A free online tool for the estimation of auditory thresholds.

ABSTRACT

PSYCHOACOUSTICS-WEB is an online tool written in JavaScript and PHP that enables the estimation of auditory sensory thresholds via adaptive threshold tracking. The toolbox implements the transformed up-down methods proposed by Levitt (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 49, 467-477, (1971) for a set of classic psychoacoustical tasks frequency, intensity, and duration discrimination of pure tones; duration discrimination and gap detection of noise; and amplitude modulation detection with noise carriers. The toolbox can be used through a common web browser; it works with both fixed and mobile devices, and requires no programming skills. PSYCHOACOUSTICS-WEB is suitable for laboratory, classroom, and online testing and is designed for two main types of users an occasional user and, above all, an experimenter using the toolbox for their own research. This latter user can create a personal account, customise existing experiments, and share them in the form of direct links to further users (e.g., the participants of a hypothetical experiment). Finally, because data storage is centralised, the toolbox offers the potential for creating a database of auditory skills.