Identification of Environmental Sounds: Role of Rhythmic Properties

Studies that have dealt with the effect of sound spectral and temporal properties on environmental sound identification have focused on a narrow range of sounds [1, 2, 3]. The purpose of the research was to evaluate the effect of sound temporal characteristics on the identification of 72 different environmental sounds, 29 of them having a rhythmic structure. We used a gating paradigm, involving a successive presentation of increasing increment of gates stimulus [4] that listeners had to identify. The minimum amount of time presentation (uniqueness point) for which an environmental sound was correctly recognized was recorded. We found that rhythmic sounds were identified earlier (tR = 160 ms) than non rhythmic (tNR = 239 ms). Furthermore, for rhythmic sounds, we observed a significant correlation between the uniqueness point and the duration of the first inter onset interval (r = 0.65). Our results suggest that sound rhythmic structure is an informative parameter in the identification process.