Identifying, rating, and remembering environmental sound events

Abstract

Sound events are sequences of closely grouped and temporally related environmental sounds that tell a story or establish a sense of place. The goal of our project was to create a set of sound events depicting various scenarios (such as a car accident, cooking breakfast, and walking outdoors) and to gather normative data about how people understand them. Samples of college students listened to 22 sound events over headphones in three self-paced, computer-based studies. In the Identification Task, 43 participants used text boxes to type descriptions of what was happening in the sound events. In the Rating Task, 39 participants used Likert scales to rate the sound events on the attributes of familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness. In the Memory Task, 42 participants answered two multiple-choice questions immediately after listening to each sound event. Detailed tables are provided for the following: (1) Description of the sound events and their components; (2) accuracy and response time measurements for each of the 22 sound events across the three studies; and (3) rank-orderings of the sound events by ease of identification, recognition of details, and rated familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness. Digital files of the stimuli, which may be of interest to auditory cognition researchers and clinical neuropsychologists, may be downloaded from either www.psychonomic.org/archive or www.cofc.edu/-marcellm/sound event studies/sndevent.htm.

Cochlear Implant-Mediated Perception of Nonlinguistic Sounds

“…Although every attempt was made to select a clean and representative set of stimuli, it must be considered that the particular NLS tokens used for this investigation might have been affected by CI signal processing to a greater extent than a different set of NLS tokens might have been. As several NLS researchers (Gygi 2001;Shafiro & Gygi 2004;Marcell et al 2005) have discussed, the definition of a representative set of nonlinguistic or environmental sounds requires many subjective assumptions. These assumptions are necessary because of the infinite number of possible sound sources, as well as the lack of a clear taxonomy (Shafiro & Gygi 2004).…”

The Time-Course of the Cross-Modal Semantic Modulation of Visual Picture Processing by Naturalistic Sounds and Spoken Words

“…The identification of naturalistic sounds is modulated by factors including acoustic properties, familiarity, and sound typicality (see Bailas, 1993;Marcell et al, 2000Marcell et al, , 2007. Among these factors, acoustic properties can be informative regarding the identity of naturalistic sounds at an early stage of processing (see Ballas, 1993), which may give rise to the discrimination between animal versus non-animal sounds at around 100 ms after onset (Murray et al, 2006;Murray and Spierer, 2009).…”

A mathematical approach to correlating objective spectro-temporal features of environmental sounds with their subjective perceptions

“…Non-linguistic sounds (NLSs) -e.g., music, a passing bus, snoring -have the advantage of being complex, having meaning and being familiar, but without the confounding semantic and linguistic constraints of language. Attempts have been made to describe how humans identify and remember such non-linguistic (environmental) sounds (e.g., Marcell et al, 2007), albeit not based on objective features of the sounds, and other studies have probed various perceptual properties of NLSs (Halpern et al, 1986;Ballas, 1993;Cycowicz & Friedman, 1998;Kumar et al, 2008;Reddy et al, 2009;Reuter & Oehler, 2011;Singh, 2011;Kirmse et al, 2012;Lewis et al, 2012;Talkington et al, 2012) to make findings such as the importance of spectral features to percepts of unpleasantness in NLSs (Halpern et al, 1986;Cox, 2008;Kumar et al, 2008;Reuter & Oehler, 2011).…”

“…These two elements -objective features and subjective perceptions -were then mapped together using various statistical and mathematical techniques. So as to ground our results in a meaningful context, we chose to map a set of objective features to human percepts which had been used in previous studies of NLS perception (Marcell et al, 2007), but which had not yet been related back to objective features or combinations thereof. These percepts were: Complexity, Pleasantness, and Familiarity.…”