One graduate student with whom Boring developed a student-professor relationship similar to the one Boring had had with Titchener was Stanley Smith Stevens. In 1936 the two published their research on tonal brightness. At the time it was known that tonal brightness varied with pitch; and, based on previous research, it was believed that high tones are bright and low tones are dull.Boring, E. G., Stevens, S. S. (1936). The nature of tonal brightness, The National Academy of Sciences, 22, 514-521. The question that Stevens and Boring researched was concerning the bright and dull tones that could be produced with a siren when the holes were appropriately spaced, hypothesizing that brightness varies with both the intensity and the frequency of the pitch. Boring suggested that they embrace the new technology and conduct the experiment with a cathode-ray oscilloscope and a wave-analyzer. They concluded through this study that tonal brightness is essentially the same as tonal density.
