Acoustic and auditory sketches: Recognition of severely simplified natural sounds by human listeners

Vincent Isnard (1, 2) , Marine Taffou (2) , Isabelle Viaud-Delmon (2) , Clara Suied (1)

1 IRBA - Institut de Recherche Biomédicale des Armées [Brétigny-sur-Orge]
2 EAC - Espaces acoustiques et cognitifs

Sounds in our environment like voices, animal calls, or musical instruments can be recognized on the basis of timbre alone. The objective of this study was to unravel the features underlying this robust sound recognition. We investigated how severely sounds can be simplified while still being recognizable. A large number of natural sounds were simplified into “auditory or acoustic sketches:” energy peaks were selected on the auditory or acoustic spectrogram, at three levels of simplification (high, medium, and low). The remaining non-sparse information was removed. Listeners were asked to classify the simplified sounds into their four original categories: instruments, birds, vehicles, or voices. We adapted a recent signal detection model to dissociate the perceptual sensitivity (d' scores) from the bias, for each category (4-AFC task). Overall, severely simplified sounds could still be recognized above chance by the listeners. Auditory distances, based on spectro-temporal excitation patterns (STEPs), were then computed. Participants' performances on the 4-AFC task were well correlated with the auditory distances between the four categories. Altogether, our results suggest that sound recognition is a very robust perceptual process, and that basic spectral and spectro-temporal differences between sounds, captured by the auditory distances, can account for this robust recognition.

Domaines: Sciences cognitives

Vincent Isnard, Marine Taffou, Isabelle Viaud-Delmon, Clara Suied. Acoustic and auditory sketches: Recognition of severely simplified natural sounds by human listeners. Acoustical Society of America, Sep 2015, Jacksonville, United States. ⟨10.1121/1.4934033⟩. ⟨hal-01250175⟩