Listener perception of single-shot small arms fire

Abstract

The ability to identify and interpret impulse sounds from small arms weaponsfire is a very important element of a soldier’s situational awareness that is criti-cally needed to avoid potential danger. For example, differentiation of hostilefrom friendly weapons fire can indicate the need for increased vigilance andcanrevealtheapproximatelocationofanenemyelement.Inaddition,estimationofweaponsizecanbeusedtoinfertheresourcesofanenemyelement.Despitethepotential operational importance of these sounds, little is known about listenerperception of impulse weapons sounds. The present work investigates listenerability to differentiate signatures of various small arms weapons on the basis ofhigh-quality recordings of single-shot impulse sounds. Experiment 1 measuredlistener perceived similarity for paired small arms impulse sounds. A multi-dimensional scaling solution (MDS) based on listener ratings showed significantoverlap in perceptual space for most rifle sounds, but the mappings of handgunsounds were largely segregated from all rifle sounds. These mappings corre-lated well with measured source and sound properties of the small arms weap-ons. Experiment 2 measured discrimination performance for selected sets ofcontrasted weapon pairings. In general, discrimination performance correlatedwell with the listener perceptual space measured in Experiment 1, with bestperformance for handgun-rifle pairings and worst performance for rifle-riflepairings. © 2012 Institute of Noise Control Engineering.