Research on Sound Events
Here is a .pdf copy of our 2007 manuscript: Marcell, M.M., Malatanos, M., Leahy, C., & Comeaux, C. (2007). Identifying, rating, and remembering environmental sound events. Behavior Research Methods, 39(3), 561-569. The co-authors - Maria Malatanos, Connie Leahy, and Cadie Comeaux - are all Psychology majors who graduated from the College of Charleston.
Abstract: Sound events are sequences of closely grouped and temporally related environmental sounds that tell a story or establish a sense of place. The goal of our project was to create a set of sound events depicting various scenarios (such as a car accident, cooking breakfast, and walking outdoors) and to gather normative data about how people understand them. Samples of college students listened to 22 sound events over headphones in three self-paced, computer- based studies. In the Identification Task, 43 participants used text boxes to type descriptions of what was happening in the sound events. In the Rating Task, 39 participants used Likert scales to rate the sound events on the attributes of familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness. In the Memory Task, 42 participants answered two multiple-choice questions immediately after listening to each sound event. Detailed tables are provided for the following: (1) Description of the sound events and their components; (2) accuracy and response time measurements for each of the 22 sound events across the three studies; and (3) rank-orderings of the sound events by ease of identification, recognition of details, and rated familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness. Digital files of the stimuli, which may be of interest to auditory cognition researchers and clinical neuropsychologists, may be downloaded from either www.psychonomic.org/archive or www.cofc.edu/~marcellm/sound event studies/sndevent.htm.
Here is a brief summary of the poster presented at APA in August, 2005
Although data collection for this study has finished, you are welcome to participate in any of the Sound Event studies below. Click here first to determine whether you have the free Macromedia Authorware browser plugin that is needed to run the studies, then run one of the studies below:
Sound Stimuli and Disclaimers: The sound event stimuli are in .WAV format, the format in which the normative data were gathered. Because many of the stimuli incorporate edited versions of sound clips that were originally recorded and made commercially available for royalty-free use by sound effects library vendors, use of these files is restricted to non-profit scientific and clinical investigations. Users are specificially prohibited from collecting and republishing the items as a separate test or as part of a sound effects collection. The authors of this study and their institutions assume no liability related to the downloading and/or use of these items.
Once the sound event files are obtained and "unzipped" they can be incorporated into any of several commercially-available multimedia software programs for presentation. If you would like to download a copy of the sound event stimuli used in this study, they are compressed into zip files and posted in this Sound Event Archive.
The sound event files can also be found in the Psychonomic Society's archive of Behavior Research Methods Supplemental Material. Simply type the first author's last name in the search engine.