The subjective duration of ramped and damped sounds

Two experiments demonstrate that the perceived duration of sounds as long as 1-s is influenced by their amplitude envelope, extending Schlauch et al.'s (2001) observations on sounds of 200-ms duration. Sounds with a monotonic decay (damped) are heard as substantially shorter than either steady sounds, or those with a monotonic increase of level (ramped). Neither a reaction time (Experiment 1 and 2) nor a staircase procedure (Experiment 2) showed evidence for a sensory explanation for these different subjective durations. The results are compatible with the suggestion of Stecker and Hafter (2000) that listeners exclude part of the tail of damped sounds in the computation of their subjective duration.