Perceptually important acoustic features of environmental sounds

Listeners were asked to indicate the sources of dozens of sound events presented over headphones. The sounds were environmental sounds made by solid objects, liquids, and/or air undergoing a variety of actions taken from the website www.auditorylab.org. Each listener gave a series of responses about possible sources for each sound so that a similarity matrix could be constructed. The results of data reduction point to a manageable set of perceptual classes of sound events that can be described with a small number of distinctive spectro‐temporal acoustic features. These features will be related to the attributes of the events that generated each class of sounds. Results for normal‐hearing listeners will be analyzed in detail and preliminary results from hearing‐impaired listeners will be previewed.