The sound quality of car horns: A psychoacoustical study of timbre

This paper is the first of a two-part study of the quality of car horn sounds. It aims to provide insights into the design of new sounds: how do we create new sounds that still warn road users against a danger related to a car? In this first part, we study the perception of the timbre of the sounds, grounded in a psychoacoustical framework. We begin to review the approaches to sound quality and choose a framework for our study. Then, after the perceptual validation of the choice of the set of sounds, we ask listeners to categorize all the recorded sounds into main families. Then we model the perception of the timbre of these sounds as three elementary sensations, each correlated with an acoustical descriptor. The results of these experiments suggest that listeners used shared perceptual dimensions along which the sounds were rated. These different dimensions, and the correlated acoustical descriptors rely on the differences between the slight variations of car horn mechanisms. They form the basis for the following study of the invariants that let a sound convey the warning message.

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