Web Technologies for Scientific Hearing Experiments and Teaching - An Overview

Scientists of many audio-related fields need to verify their theories by conducting controlled experiments with human test subjects. The process of developing and conducting such experiments often poses non-trivial challenges to scientists and test subjects. Web technologies promise simple delivery of experiments as interactive websites, possibly even on subjects' own computers. Similar benefits are possible for teaching science. While many tasks in hearing experiments and teaching are well-supported with current web-based tools, support for scientific data structures, signal processing operations and statistical data analysis methods is still incomplete in comparison with entrenched non-web tools. These shortcomings could easily be overcome with a few libraries, and would provide a great boon to scientists and educators