Applications
Understanding the perceptual attack time of recorded sounds is important when scheduling those sounds to be played by a computer. For example, suppose you want to play a melody on a series of notes from different instruments. If the notes' physical onsets are equally spaced, the result will probably sound a little bit unsteady or out of rhythm; to get a rhythmically correct result it's necessary to account for each sound's perceptual attack time, i.e., to schedule the notes so that their perceptual attack times, not their onsets, are spaced according to the rhythm of the melody.
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