Perception of multidimensional complex sounds
Gary R. Kidd, Charles S. Watson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1987
Listeners' abilities to perceive information independently encoded in different dimensions of complex sounds were examined in experiments that required simultaneous attention to three dimensions. Stimuli consisted of sequences of one, three, five, or seven brief pulses that were generated by adding five 100-ms sinusoidal components. Each pulse had one of two values on each of the following complex dimensions: (1) harmonicity (harmonic versus inharmonic relations among the components); (2) spectral shape (linearly decreasing amplitude versus a two-peaked amplitude profile); and (3) amplitude envelope (slow versus rapid rise and decay times). Stimuli were selected such that the two values on each dimension were highly discriminable. In a classification task involving combinations of dimensional values, listeners showed an impressive ability to integrate information over pulses within sequences, with performance at about 5% to 10% below ideal performance for all sequence lengths. However, performance was not a simple function of the discriminability of the individual dimensions, and there were major differences among listeners' tendencies to differentially attend to each of the dimensions. [Work supported by USN/NMRDC and by AFOSR.]