Identification of categories of liquid sounds.

Abstract

Sounds involving liquid sources are part of everyday life. They form a category of sounds easily identified by human listeners in different experimental studies. Unlike acoustic models that focus on bubble vibrations, real life instances of liquid sounds, such as sounds produced by liquids with or without other materials, are very diverse and include water drop sounds, noisy flows, and even solid vibrations. The process that allows listeners to group these different sounds in the same category remains unclear. This article presents a perceptual experiment based on a sorting task of liquid sounds from a household environment. It seeks to reveal the cognitive subcategories of this set of sounds. The clarification of this perceptive process led to the observation of similarities between the perception of liquid sounds and other categories of environmental sounds. Furthermore, the results provide a taxonomy of liquid sounds on which an acoustic analysis was performed that highlights the acoustical properties of the categories, including different rates of air bubble vibration.