Perception of global properties, objects, and settings in natural auditory scenes

Abstract

Theories of auditory scene analysis suggest our perception of scenes relies on identifying and segregating objects within it. However, a more global process may occur while analyzing scenes, which has been evidenced in the visual domain. In our first experiment, we studied perception of eight global properties (e.g., openness), using a collection of 200 high-quality auditory scenes. Participants showed high agreement on their ratings of global properties. The global properties were explained by a two-factor model. Acoustic features of scenes were explained by a seven-factor model, and linearly predicted the global ratings by different amounts (R-squared = 0.33–0.87), although we also observed nonlinear relationships between acoustical and global variables. A multi-layer neural network trained to recognize auditory objects in everyday soundscapes from YouTube shows high-level embeddings of our 200 scenes are correlated with some global variables at earlier stages of processing than others. In a second experiment, we evaluated participants’ accuracy in identifying the setting of and objects within scenes across three durations (1, 2, and 4 s). Overall, participants performed better on the object identification task, but needed longer duration stimuli to do so. These results suggest object identification may require more processing time and/or attention switching than setting identification.