Classification of everyday sounds: Influence of the degree of sound source identification

Based on a review of everyday sound classification studies, we define three types of similarity that might underlie the formation of categories: acoustical similarity, related to the perception of the sound signal properties; causal similarity, related to the perception of the cause of the sound; semantic similarity, related to the meaning of the sounds. This study focuses on the influence of the degree of sound source identification on the type of similarity used during a free sorting task. Our hypothesis is that well‐identified sounds will lead to categories based on causal or semantic similarities, while non‐identified sounds will lead to categories based on acoustical similarity. First we measure the causal uncertainty of each sound of a set of kitchen sounds. We ask to participants to describe the cause of the sounds in order to measure the degree of identification for each sound. The results of a free sorting task on this sound corpus indicate that participants groups together sounds according to ou...