Perception of the timbre of car horns

Due to the technologies used, there exist only a few different kinds of car horn sounds.Prior to the design of new sounds, our study aims to define these sounds from a perceptual standpoint, using a two-step procedure: The first step was a free classification experiment. We found a structure of 9 families of sounds. The second step was a dissimilarity judgment experiment based on these families. The results are represented by a timbre space with three dimensions. Three psychoacoustic descriptors match the perceptual dimensions, allowing us to characterize the perception of the different horn technologies.