loudness, in acoustics, attribute of sound that determines the intensity of auditory sensation produced. The loudness of sound as perceived by human ears is roughly proportional to the logarithm of sound intensity: when the intensity is very small, the sound is not audible; when it is too great, it becomes painful and dangerous to the ear. The sound intensity that the ear can tolerate is approximately 1012 times greater than the amount that is just perceptible. This range varies from person to person and with the frequency of the sound.
A unit of loudness, called the phon, has been established. The number of phons of any given sound is equal to the number of decibels of a pure 1,000-hertz tone judged by the listener to be equally loud. The decibel scale is objective in that the intensity is defined physically and any intensity can be compared directly with the physically defined reference point. The phon scale is partially subjective in that the judgment of a listener is involved in comparing any arbitrary sound with the physically defined reference in order to establish its loudness in phons. The average result from a large number of people then establishes the definition of equal loudness curves (i.e., curves that show the varying absolute intensities of a pure tone that has the same loudness to the ear at various frequencies).
A third, more-subjective loudness scale involves listener judgment as to what constitutes “doubling” of the loudness of a sound. A tone having a loudness of 40 phons is defined as having a subjective loudness of one sone; a tone judged by the listener to be “twice as loud” would have a loudness of two sones, three times as loud would be three sones, and so forth. As in the case of the definition of the phon, the average values from observations by a large number of people would then define the details of the scale for purposes of classifying and measuring sound levels.
Subjective scales were developed because they tend to be more useful than a totally objective scale in describing how the ear works. In general, the physical sciences and engineering use more-objective scales such as the decibel, while measurements in biological and medical fields tend to use the more-subjective scales.