Auditory Sketches: Very Sparse Representations of Sounds Are Still Recognizable.

ABSTRACT: Sounds in our environment like voices, animal calls or musical instruments are easily recognized by human listeners. Understanding the key features underlying this robust sound recognition is an important question in auditory science. Here, we studied the recognition by human listeners of new classes of sounds: acoustic and auditory sketches, sounds that are severely impoverished but still recognizable. Starting from a time-frequency representation, a sketch is obtained by keeping only sparse elements of the original signal, here, by means of a simple peak-picking algorithm. Two time-frequency representations were compared: a biologically grounded one, the auditory spectrogram, which simulates peripheral auditory filtering, and a simple acoustic spectrogram, based on a Fourier transform. T

SUBMITTER: Isnard V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4780819 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature