Units of "threshold" in voice key kwargs?

Coding
1

Windows 10, PsychoPy 1.85.2.

I’m using the voice key to measure reaction times to reading a presented word. There’s some ambient noise in the room from ventilation, computer hum, people in the hallway outside. I’m using Audacity to try to run some spectral analyses so I can find the best band-pass filter and threshold to use.

Since audacity tells me the ambient decibels for each spectrum, it would be useful to know the relationship between the units of PsychoPy’s “threshold” kwarg and decibels. Does “threshold” have any interpretation as a number of decibels?

2

Maybe @jeremygray knows the answer off the top of his head?

3

The short answer is, no, its not decibels. Its effectively arbitrary units (I think). Its probably possible to work out a translation to db’s, at least for a particular microphone.