Everyday listening: an annotated bibliography

Many of the sounds we encounter every day are generated by physical events that involve an interaction between objects (a coin dropped on the floor, water drips falling on the sink) or a change of the properties of single objects (a bursting balloon). Are listeners able to recover the properties of these physical events on the basis of auditory information alone? What is the nature of the information used to recover these features? These questions were originally raised inside the ecological approach to , firstly extended to the study of the auditory modality by Vanderveer [240]. Gaver [92, 97] outlined a taxonomy of environmental sounds, in order to “entice other explorers” into this domain. His taxonomy is based on the simple assertion that sounds are generated by an “interaction of materials”, and it is inside this map that we should place the pieces of experimental evidence collected so far, synthesized in this chapter.