Abstract
Categorisation is a fundamental cognitive process that plays a central role in everyday behaviour and action. Whereas previous studies have investigated the categorisation of isolated everyday sounds, this paper presents an experiment to investigate the cognitive categorisation of everyday sounds within their original context. A group of eighteen expert and non-expert listeners took part in a free sorting task using 110 sounds identified within ambisonic reproductions of urban soundscapes. The participants were asked to sort the objects into groups of sounds that served a similar purpose in the overall perception of the soundscape. Following this, the participants were asked to provide descriptive labels for the groups they had formed. The results were analysed using hierarchical agglomerative clustering and non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) to explore both the structure and dimensionality of the data. The resulting hierarchical clustering of objects show three top level categories relating to transient sounds, continuous sounds, and speech and vocalisations. Sub-categories were identified in each of the top level categories which included harmonic and non-harmonic continuous sounds, clear speech, unintelligible speech, vocalisations, transient sounds that indicate actions, and non-salient transient sounds. The first two dimensions revealed by the MDS analysis relate to temporal extent and intelligibility respectively. Interpretation of the third dimension is less clear, but may be related to harmonic content.
Highlights
Categorisation is a fundamental cognitive process [1] that plays a central role in everyday behaviour and action, supporting the organisation of knowledge and permitting inductive inference about the world [2]
Similar results have been found in studies into the categorisation of complex urban soundscapes such as the distinction found by Maffiolo et al [36] between ‘‘event sequences” where listeners distinguish between individual sounds and ‘‘amorphous sequences” where individual sounds are not distinguished
These findings suggest that many of the categorisation frameworks found in previous studies into the categorisation of isolated everyday sounds may be extended to the categorisation of auditory objects within urban soundscapes
Summary
Categorisation is a fundamental cognitive process [1] that plays a central role in everyday behaviour and action, supporting the organisation of knowledge (i.e. through the development of taxonomies) and permitting inductive inference about the world (i.e. through the assumption that members of the same category share similar properties) [2]. The process of categorisation is grounded in perceptual and attentional mechanisms capable of detecting similarities and correspondences in the environment [3]. Contemporary theories of categorisation suggest that attentional mechanisms allow the salience of different features to vary as a function of context [6,7]. This suggests that categorisation is contingent on task, context, and by the individual’s intentions, goals, and past experiences [8]. A simple example of this would be the in the comparison of different coloured shapes; when comparing a red triangle and a red circle, shape would be a more salient feature than colour,
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