The perceptual dimensionality of environmental sounds

The relationships between acoustic properties and listeners? judgments of sound quality were investigated using a semantic differential technique. A diverse collection of 145 common sounds was presented to 32 listeners who rated the sounds on 20 seven-point rating scales. The sounds were of a variety of common objects and events (e.g., dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, door closing) as well as ambient sounds that sometimes involved multiple objects and events (e.g., traffic, cafeteria noise, rain). Rating scales included subjective adjective pairs (e.g., happy - sad, relaxed - tense) and objective pairs (e.g., hard - soft, large - small). Examination of the correlations between individual subject?s ratings and mean ratings for all subjects revealed generally good agreement. A principal components analysis of the rating data showed that the judgments of the listeners could be associated with four dimensions, accounting for 89% of the variance. The four dimensions roughly corresponded to “harshness”, “complexity”, “size”, and “appeal”. Correlations between acoustic properties and the factor loadings (as well as the individual rating scales) revealed several reliable associations between acoustic attributes and sound quality judgments. However, the prediction of perceived quality based on acoustic properties improved considerably when more homogeneous subsets or categories of sounds were examined. The relative importance of specific acoustic properties depended strongly on the sound category.