AUDIO
LOUDNESS— IN THE EAR OF THE BEHOLDER? | Jeff Hawley
Quick question: How loud is a guitar? I’ d venture to guess you didn’ t come up with a clear answer. Which guitar? Who is playing it? What song? These are good qualifying questions, but even with them, we’ d likely still need to approach the question differently. What we really mean by“ How loud is a guitar?” is rarely obvious without several additional questions.
If you’ ve followed my philosophical research over the last few years, this sort of question may feel vaguely familiar. As part of my PhD research, I deployed a large-scale survey to live sound engineers to explore questions like“ Where is sound located?” and“ What is a sound?” The project is coming along nicely— I only need to write about 80,000 more words and dig deep into the history of Analytic Philosophy to defend my answers. Stay tuned! This article picks up on an arguably related question asked during my Christian Musician Summit session on future-proofing your houseof-worship sound console and PA system. We were discussing why some older congregants often struggle to understand the pastor, say the music feels“ muddled,” or— most relevant
here— complain that the music is too loud. After a quick overview of presbycusis( a common type of sensorineural / inner-ear hearing loss), I mentioned the term perceived loudness. And then a wonderful question from the front row of class:“ Can you explain what perceived loudness is?” Luckily my philosopher’ s hat( beret?) was ready for the lively discussion about the many ways we perceive, measure, describe, and relate to sound. Here is a quick summary and continuation of that in-class discussion.
RING THE DECIBELS! Some of you may think the loudness question is simple: it’ s whatever the Sound Pressure Level( SPL) meter says, measured in decibels. You may have heard things like,“ Our PA usually sits around 95 dB,” or“ Someone’ s going to call the cops on Bruce’ s midnight guitar shredding if it’ s 85 dB across the street!”
I won’ t get into the weeds on decibels, micropascals, and logarithms here. What matters is that decibels give us a relative way to compare sound X with sound Y. If X and Y are two different sound sources( say two different guitar amps sounding on stage at different times) and X measures 95 dB while Y measures 100 dB, we can say Y is louder— mathematically.
If a congregant in the third pew shouts,“ the mix is WAY too loud!” can the audio engineer just respond,“ Relax— it’ s only 92 dB”? I suppose they could. But this is exactly why perceived loudness came up during the session. Decibels
106 November 2025 Subscribe for Free...