Exploring concurrent auditory icon recognition

Abstract

This poster explores and deepens existing studies into the identi- fication of concurrently presented auditory icons. The motivation for this work was to gain a better understanding of auditory icons where several are played together simultaneously. A set of de- scriptors for everyday sounds were collected from participants and classified into action and object categories. The exploration con- sidered the hypothesis that when auditory icons did not have the same object or action descriptors that the identifications of the au- ditory icons would improve. This was studied in conditions where three, six, and nine sounds were simultaneously presented. These conditions had two distinct sub-categories, the first category used a prior classification of sounds to ensure no sound pair in the con- dition had the same action or object properties. The second sub- category used random selection of the sounds meaning that similar sound could exist within the particular condition. A onset-to-onset gap of 300 ms between sounds being presented was used. The re- sults supports earlier findings and showed that distinguishing be- tween object and action properties of auditory icons did improve their identification accuracy. It was found that prior classification allows listeners to achieve close to a 10% identification improve- ment in accuracy.