Abstract
Four experiments investigated the acoustical correlates of similarity and categorization judgments of environmental sounds. In Experiment 1, similarity ratings were obtained from pairwise comparisons of recordings of 50 environmental sounds. A three-dimensional multidimensional scaling (MDS) solution showed three distinct clusterings of the sounds, which included harmonic sounds, discrete impact sounds, and continuous sounds. Furthermore, sounds from similar sources tended to be in close proximity to each other in the MDS space. The orderings of the sounds on the individual dimensions of the solution were well predicted by linear combinations of acoustic variables, such as harmonicity, amount of silence, and modulation depth. The orderings of sounds also correlated significantly with MDS solutions for similarity ratings of imagined sounds and for imagined sources of sounds, obtained in Experiments 2 and 3—as was the case for free categorization of the 50 sounds (Experiment 4)—although the categorization data were less well predicted by acoustic features than were the similarity data.
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This research was supported by Grant RO1 DC00250 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders, Grant MH12436-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and Grant RO1 07998 from the National Institute of Aging. Conversations with Robert Goldstone contributed materially to this research.
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Gygi, B., Kidd, G.R. & Watson, C.S. Similarity and categorization of environmental sounds. Perception & Psychophysics 69, 839–855 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193921
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193921