Abstract
Two experiments examined listeners’ ability to discriminate the geometric shape of simple resonating bodies on the basis of their corresponding auditory attributes. In cross-modal matching tasks, subjects listened to recordings of pairs of metal bars (Experiment 1) or wooden bars (Experiment 2) struck in sequence and then selected a visual depiction of the bar cross sections that correctly represented their relative widths and heights from two opposing pairs presented on a computer screen. Multidimensional scaling solutions derived from matching scores for metal and wooden bars indicated that subjects’ performance varied directly with increasing differences in the width/height (WIH) ratios of both sets of bars. Subsequent acoustic analyses revealed that the frequency components from torsional vibrational modes and the ratios of frequencies of transverse bending modes in the bars correlated strongly with both the bars’ WIH ratios and bar coordinates in the multidimensional configurations. The results suggest that listeners can encode the auditory properties of sound sources by extracting certain invariant physical characteristics of their gross geometric properties from their acoustic behavior.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported in part by a CogniSciences postdoctoral fellowship from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique to S.L. and a grant from the Ministère de l’Environnement to S.M. We thank the author Bennett Smith for his design of thePsiExp computer program, Michel Ducourau for his assistance in fabricating the bars, and Koei Kudo for her help in analyzing the data.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lakatos, S., McAdams, S. & Caussé, R. The representation of auditory source characteristics: Simple geometric form. Perception & Psychophysics 59, 1180–1190 (1997). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03214206
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03214206