Real, foley or synthetic? An evaluation of everyday walking sounds

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether foley sounds, real recordings and low quality synthetic sounds can be distinguished when used to sonify a video and if foley sounds can be rated as more expressive than real sounds. The main idea is to find a motivation for having such a solid tradition in using foley sounds for a film track. In particular this work focuses on walking sounds: five different scenes of a walking person were video recorded and each video was then mixed with the three different kind of sounds mentioned above. Subjects were asked to recognise and describe the action performed, to evaluate their confidence, the realism of the action and its expressiveness. Early results shows that foley sounds and real sounds cannot be distinguished by the subjects. A preliminary audio-only test was performed with the sounds used in the audio-video test in order to assess the recognition rate without the visual help.