Perceptually important acoustic features of environmental sounds.
Laurie M. Heller, Benjamin Skerritt, Emily Ammerman · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
Listeners were asked to indicate the sources of dozens of sound events presented over headphones. The sounds were environmental sounds made by solid objects, liquids, and/or air undergoing a variety of actions taken from the website www.auditorylab.org. Each listener gave a series of responses about possible sources for each sound so that a similarity matrix could be constructed. The results of data reduction point to a manageable set of perceptual classes of sound events that can be described with a small number of distinctive spectro-temporal acoustic features. These features will be related to the attributes of the events that generated each class of sounds. Results for normal-hearing listeners will be analyzed in detail and preliminary results from hearing-impaired listeners will be previewed. [Work supported by NSF 0446955 and RI STAC.]