What is an asper?

Acoustic roughness is measured in aspers (from the Latin word for rough). An asper is the roughness of a 1 kHz tone, at 60 dB, 100% modulated at 70 Hz. That is, the signal

(1 + sin(140It)) sin(2000It)

where t is time in seconds.

Here's what that sounds like (if you play this at 60 dB, about the loudness of a typical conversation at one meter):

And here's the Python code that made the file:

 from scipy.io.wavfile import write from numpy import arange, pi, sin, int16 def f(t, f_c, f_m): # t = time # f_c = carrier frequency # f_m = modulation frequency return (1 + sin(2*pi*f_m*t))*sin(2*f_c*pi*t) def to_integer(signal): # Take samples in [-1, 1] and scale to 16-bit integers, # values between -2^15 and 2^15 - 1. return int16(signal*(2**15 - 1)) N = 48000 # samples per second x = arange(3*N) # three seconds of audio # 1 asper corresponds to a 1 kHz tone, 100% modulated at 70 Hz, at 60 dB data = f(x/N, 1000, 70) write("one_asper.wav", N, to_integer(data))

See also: What is a vacil?