Auditory Reachability: An Affordance Approach to the Perception of Sound Source Distance

Abstract

The literature on perception of sound source distance reveals a wide range of lisrener accuracy. Most experiments have listeners perform unintuitive tasks, using unnatural sounds presented in impoverished acousric environments. The present experimencs implement an affordance paradigm for which listeners judge the "reachabiliry" of a natural, live sound source in a familiar acoustic environment. Resulrc reveal that listeners are quite accurate in judging whether the source is reachable and are sersitive to the advantage afforded by cwo vs. one degree of freedom reaches. Further analyses reveal that when scaled to an intrirsic bodily dimension, judgrnent differences berween listeners disappear, implicating intrinsically scaled specificational information. A follow-up experiment explores the potential informational support for these judgmencs testing the usefulness of head movements and binaural hearing' Results reveal that whereas head movements had no bearing on either judgment acculacy or consistencv, binaural information did enhance listener consistency. This could suggest that the allometric relation between interaural distance and arm length might provide a basis for auditory reachabiliry judgments.Although there is a vast lirerature on localization of sound sources in the horizontal plane (see Middlebrooks & Green, 199 1 , for a review) , relatively little research has addressed perception of sound source distance. This is surprising because ic is critical for animals to know the location of objects in both planes. For example, a bat uses distance information in timing its interceptive approach to a moth. The same is rrue of a visually impaired individual guiding his approach to switch off a radio. Sound source distance information is also used in guiding vision. For example, Guski (1992) proposed that knowing the changing distance of a looming objectRequests for reprina should be sent to

Bringing Sounds into Use: Thinking of Sounds as Materials and a Sketch of Auditory Affordances

“…Doing so has allowed researchers to understand the specifying variables participants use to perceive aspects of auditory events. Elsewhere, research has shown that listeners can perceive the geometric shape of an object from both radiant and reverberant auditory information [36,37] and that participants can also perceive the relative distance of how far away a sounding objects is from them [38,39]. Further still, people also seem to show keen ability to perceive the actions and attributes of other agents that may create an auditory event.…”

Echolocating Distance by Moving and Stationary Listeners

“…However, future research less concerned with the dynamic or stationary question can be designed to implement more "natural" action-oriented judgment tasks for human listeners. Examples of such tasks could include testing echolocated reachability of reflecting surfaces (Carello, Grosofsky, Reichel, Soloman, & Turvey, 1989;Litovsky & Clifton, 1992;Rosenblum et al, 1996), echolocated passability through apertures comprised of reflecting surface frames (Gordon & Rosenblum, 1999;Warren & Wang, 1987), echolocating the vertical extent of a surface to determine if it could allow stepping over (Pufall & Dunbar, 1992;Schmuckler, 1996), or intercepting a looming surface through echolocation (e.g., Bootsma & van Wieringen, 1990;Simmons, 1989).…”

Extracting Meaning from Sound: Nomic Mappings, Everyday Listening, and Perceiving Object Size from Frequency

“…Heine & Guski, 1991;Jenison, 1997;Rosenblum, Wuestefeld, & Anderson, 1996;Stoffregen & Pittenger, 1995;Walker & Ehrenstein, 2000;Warren & Verbrugge, 1984). Gaver (1986) proposed that acoustic properties of sound convey information that enables identification of an event.…”