Dataset Information

Sound Categories: Category Formation and Evidence-Based Taxonomies.

ABSTRACT: Five evidence-based taxonomies of everyday sounds frequently reported in the soundscape literature have been generated. An online sorting and category-labeling method that elicits rather than prescribes descriptive words was used. A total of N = 242 participants took part. The main categories of the soundscape taxonomy were people, nature, and manmade, with each dividing into further categories. Sounds within the nature and manmade categories, and two further individual sound sources, dogs, and engines, were explored further by repeating the procedure using multiple exemplars. By generating multidimensional spaces containing both sounds and the spontaneously generated descriptive words the procedure allows for the interpretation of the psychological dimensions along which sounds are organized. This reveals how category formation is based upon different cues - sound source-event identification, subjective-states, and explicit assessment of the acoustic signal - in different contexts. At higher levels of the taxonomy the majority of words described sound source-events. In contrast, when categorizing dog sounds a greater proportion of the words described subjective-states, and valence and arousal scores of these words correlated with their coordinates along the first two dimensions of the data. This is consistent with valence and arousal judgments being the primary categorization strategy used for dog sounds. In contrast, when categorizing engine sounds a greater proportion of the words explicitly described the acoustic signal. The coordinates of sounds along the first two dimensions were found to correlate with fluctuation strength and sharpness, consistent with explicit assessment of acoustic signal features underlying category formation for engine sounds. By eliciting descriptive words the method makes explicit the subjective meaning of these judgments based upon valence and arousal and acoustic properties, and the results demonstrate distinct strategies being spontaneously used to categorize different types of sounds.

SUBMITTER: Bones O

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6077929 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Sound Categories: Category Formation and Evidence-Based Taxonomies.

Bones Oliver O Cox Trevor J TJ Davies William J WJ

Frontiers in psychology 20180730

Five evidence-based taxonomies of everyday sounds frequently reported in the soundscape literature have been generated. An online sorting and category-labeling method that elicits rather than prescribes descriptive words was used. A total of <i>N</i> = 242 participants took part. The main categories of the soundscape taxonomy were people, nature, and manmade, with each dividing into further categories. Sounds within the nature and manmade categories, and two further individual sound sources, dog ...[more]

PMID: 30104989

Similar Datasets

Project description:With regard to hearing perception, it remains unclear as to whether, or the extent to which, different conceptual categories of real-world sounds and related categorical knowledge are differentially represented in the brain. Semantic knowledge representations are reported to include the major divisions of living versus non-living things, plus more specific categories including animals, tools, biological motion, faces, and places-categories typically defined by their characteristic visual features. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regions showing preferential activity to four categories of action sounds, which included non-vocal human and animal actions (living), plus mechanical and environmental sound-producing actions (non-living). The results showed a striking antero-posterior division in cortical representations for sounds produced by living versus non-living sources. Additionally, there were several significant differences by category, depending on whether the task was category-specific (e.g. human or not) versus non-specific (detect end-of-sound). In general, (1) human-produced sounds yielded robust activation in the bilateral posterior superior temporal sulci independent of task. Task demands modulated activation of left lateralized fronto-parietal regions, bilateral insular cortices, and sub-cortical regions previously implicated in observation-execution matching, consistent with "embodied" and mirror-neuron network representations subserving recognition. (2) Animal action sounds preferentially activated the bilateral posterior insulae. (3) Mechanical sounds activated the anterior superior temporal gyri and parahippocampal cortices. (4) Environmental sounds preferentially activated dorsal occipital and medial parietal cortices. Overall, this multi-level dissociation of networks for preferentially representing distinct sound-source categories provides novel support for grounded cognition models that may underlie organizational principles for hearing perception.

Dataset Information

Sound Categories: Category Formation and Evidence-Based Taxonomies.

Publications

Sound Categories: Category Formation and Evidence-Based Taxonomies.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets