Noise/Signal: two different listening experiences for deterministic and non deterministic sound stimulus

Rodrigo C. Borges

The duality between signal and noise is widely observed in the scientific context of the 20th century. Noise is retrospectively associated to nuisance, annoyance, and was even subjectively defined as a non-signal. Definition, anyway, takes noise away from its original meaning, turns it into signal and keeps this duality existing through time. This work treats the subject as a matter of perception, more specifically, as a matter of two different listening experiences for deterministic and non deterministic sound stimulus. People with trained ears were asked to freely choose adjectives for pairs of sounds took from a group of: three different probability distributed white noises, a pink noise, a Brownian noise, a square, a square with aliasing effect, a sawtooth, and a pure sine wave. Twenty seven acoustic descriptors were extracted from the samples, from spectral kurtosis to dissonance level. The results were submitted to factorial analysis for finding the best descriptors when separating both groups of sounds, and which physical parameters are correlated to semantic ones. The results points 'granularity/continuity' as the most successful adjectives for separating signal from noise, the presence of a fundamental frequency as a determinant for the distinction, and some correlation between subjective and objective data.

Mots clés: Noise Perception; Listening Experience; Signal/Noise

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Rodrigo C. Borges. Noise/Signal: two different listening experiences for deterministic and non deterministic sound stimulus. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00810897⟩