Speaker
Description
Watercourses are dynamic systems whose acoustic manifestations vary as a function of discharge, flow velocity, and hydrogeomorphological structure. Characterizing how such acoustic manifestations are perceived is essential for understanding the capacity of human beings to monitor crucial geophysical information in their close environment with their auditory system. Building on prior work evaluating the human ability to detect water in natural soundscapes, the present study investigated human sensitivity to hydrodynamic changes in riparian environments.A corpus of acoustic recordings was acquired along a 400-m reach of the Golo River (Corsica, France) using an array of 8 microphones. The site, located downstream of a hydroelectric facility, provided controlled variations in discharge, yielding a range of hydraulic conditions. Estimated discharge measurements were collected concurrently, enabling precise temporal alignment between hydro-geo-morphological parameters and acoustic signals.Stimuli derived from this corpus were presented diotically over headphones in a three-interval, forced choice oddity paradigm. On each trial, human listeners were tasked to identify the interval that differed from the other ones, allowing estimation of auditory discrimination performance as a function of hydrodynamic contrast. In parallel, a computational model of the human auditory system was employed to extract sound-texture statistics at the output of cochlear and modulation filters in response to the same sounds. Simulations evaluated whether sound-texture statistics predict human auditory sensitivity to flow variations.By integrating hyrogeomorphological and psychophysical data with model-based analyses, this work aims to identify diagnostic acoustic features of hydrodynamic change in humans, and to advance the use of sound as a proxy for ecological dynamics.