Exploring Concurrent Auditory Icon Recognition

This poster explores and deepens existing studies into the identification of concurrently presented auditory icons. The motivation for this work was to gain a better understanding of auditory icons where several are played together simultaneously. A set of descriptors for everyday sounds were collected from participants and classified into action and object categories. The exploration considered the hypothesis that when auditory icons did not have the same object or action descriptors that the identifications of the auditory icons would improve. This was studied in conditions where three, six, and nine sounds were simultaneously presented. These conditions had two distinct sub-categories, the first category used a prior classification of sounds to ensure no sound pair in the condition had the same action or object properties. The second subcategory used random selection of the sounds meaning that similar sound could exist within the particular condition. A onset-to-onset gap of 300 ms between sounds being presented was used. The results supports earlier findings and showed that distinguishing between object and action properties of auditory icons did improve their identification accuracy. It was found that prior classification allows listeners to achieve close to a 10% identification improvement in accuracy.