Equivalent rectangular bandwidth

Equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB) is a big, long word that means something very simple. You know how when you hear different sounds, they can be high-pitched or low-pitched? Like a bird chirping is high-pitched and a truck honking is low-pitched? Well, each pitch takes up a certain amount of space in your ears. ERB is just a way of saying how much space each pitch takes up.

Imagine you have a bunch of different colored crayons in a box. Some of the crayons are fat and some are skinny. If you wanted to make a picture using only certain colors, you might put all the fat crayons to one side and all the skinny crayons to the other side. This way, you can easily pick what you need without having to dig through all the crayons.

That's kind of like what ERB does. It separates all the different pitches you hear into groups based on how much space they take up in your ears. This makes it easier for scientists and engineers to study and understand sound, because they can focus on just one group at a time.

So basically, equivalent rectangular bandwidth is just a way of organizing different sounds into groups based on how much space they take up in your ears. It sounds complicated, but really it's just like organizing your crayons by size so you can find the colors you need faster!