Sound texture perception via statistics of the auditory periphery: evidence from sound synthesis.

ABSTRACT: Rainstorms, insect swarms, and galloping horses produce "sound textures"--the collective result of many similar acoustic events. Sound textures are distinguished by temporal homogeneity, suggesting they could be recognized with time-averaged statistics. To test this hypothesis, we processed real-world textures with an auditory model containing filters tuned for sound frequencies and their modulations, and measured statistics of the resulting decomposition. We then assessed the realism and recognizability of novel sounds synthesized to have matching statistics. Statistics of individual frequency channels, capturing spectral power and sparsity, generally failed to produce compelling synthetic textures; however, combining them with correlations between channels produced identifiable and natur

SUBMITTER: McDermott JH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4143345 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature