Welcome to the MedLibrary.org Wikipedia Supplement on Bark scale -- Please Click to Return to Front Page

The Bark scale is a psychoacoustical scale proposed by Eberhard Zwicker in 1961. It is named after Heinrich Barkhausen who proposed the first subjective measurements of loudness¹.

The scale ranges from 1 to 24 and corresponds to the first 24 critical bands of hearing. The subsequent band edges are (in Hz) 20, 100, 200, 300, 400, 510, 630, 770, 920, 1080, 1270, 1480, 1720, 2000, 2320, 2700, 3150, 3700, 4400, 5300, 6400, 7700, 9500, 12000, 15500.

It is related to, but somewhat less popular than the mel scale.

To convert a frequency f (Hz) into Bark use:

or (traunmuller 1990)

if result < 2 add 0.15*(2-result)
if result > 20.1 add 0.22*(result-20.1)

with z in bark.

See also

• Luminosity function, which describes the average sensitivity of the human eye to light of different wavelengths.

References

1. ^ Zwicker, E. (1961), "Subdivision of the audible frequency range into critical bands," The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 33, Feb., 1961.

External links

• Smith and Abel - Bark and ERB Bilinear Transforms (1999)
• Auditory scales of frequency representation

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 3 September 2008, at 12:02.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Bark scale".

The URL for this specific entry is:

• http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Bark_scale

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.