Speaker
Description
Shafiro and Gygi (2004) – who pioneered psychoacoustic research on environmental sounds – promoted a rigorous methodology for selecting appropriate stimuli to study the auditory perception of this category of sounds by human listeners. Here we propose a theoretical rationale to complement this methodology, based on an ecological approach grounded in recent findings concerning the perception of biotic and abiotic sounds and complex scenes. This rationale emphasizes the importance of choosing acoustic stimuli and interpreting test outcomes based on: (i) the sounds’ spectro-temporal modulation characteristics and causal properties; (ii) the role of low- vs. high-level auditory mechanisms in the perception of environmental sounds, with a fundamental distinction between biotic and abiotic sounds, animal vocalisations and action sounds, and textural and non-textural sounds; (iii) context (i.e., the type of environment: domestic indoor, urban outdoor, and natural outdoor); (iv) the type of monitoring tasks to be performed by participants and their hearing-related functional character and emotional valence in daily life. This rationale should help in designing test batteries that are better suited to assessing the perception of environmental sounds in healthy listeners, patients with hearing impairment and brain damage, as well as in designing rehabilitation devices and audio processing algorithms.