Listener expertise and sound identification influence the categorization of environmental sounds.

Abstract

The influence of listener's expertise and sound identification on the categorization of environmental sounds is reported in three studies. In Study 1, the causal uncertainty of 96 sounds was measured by counting the different causes described by 29 participants. In Study 2, 15 experts and 15 nonexperts classified a selection of 60 sounds and indicated the similarities they used. In Study 3, 38 participants indicated their confidence in identifying the sounds. Participants reported using either acoustical similarities or similarities of the causes of the sounds. Experts used acoustical similarity more often than nonexperts, who used the similarity of the cause of the sounds. Sounds with a low causal uncertainty were more often grouped together because of the similarities of the cause, whereas sounds with a high causal uncertainty were grouped together more often because of the acoustical similarities. The same conclusions were reached for identification confidence. This measure allowed the sound classification to be predicted, and is a straightforward method to determine the appropriate description of a sound.

The Role of Sound Source Perception in Gestural Sound Description

“…To be consistent with study [Lemaitre et al 2010], we used a very similar apparatus. The sounds were played diotically by a Mac Book Pro workstation with a MOTU firewire 828 sound card.…”

“…The source of each sound is described in [Lemaitre et al 2010]. These sounds form the causal corpus that are supposed to be easily identified in terms of action or object causing them.…”

“…The initial sound corpus was taken from the study by Lemaitre et al [Lemaitre et al 2010]. The authors chose a set of sounds created by actions on objects from a domestic context (such as kitchen objects) to ensure that the sound sources were likely to be known to all listeners.…”

“…A description of the sounds are reported in Table I. Corpus of the ten most identified causal sounds in terms of object or action, from [Lemaitre et al 2010]. …”

“…He asked one group of listeners to sort together sounds "which they may hear together in the environment" while another group was asked to sort sounds "on the basis of their acoustical characteristics, independently of their meaning". Recently, Lemaitre et al [Lemaitre et al 2010] showed that the categorization based on either the action/object or acoustic qualities depends on the sound identification and listener's expertise. This means that when a sound source can be identified, the sound is categorized based on its related action/object.…”