Surveying the sounds used in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (1950–2017)

Abstract

The earliest auditory psychophysical experiments involved naturalistic sounds such as hammers striking plates. The subsequent development and ubiquity of desktop computing gave researchers the ability to more precisely control stimulus parameters such as frequency, amplitude, and duration (Neuhoff, 2004). However much of our everyday listening is for events rather than easily manipulated properties (Gaver, 1993), and the world lacks the kinds of constrained sounds often used in auditory research (Phillips et al., 2002). Although simplistic auditory stimuli hold benefits with respect to control, their disproportionate use poses problems for generalizing outcomes from key experiments. To provide insight into the sounds used in auditory perception research, we surveyed a representative sample of auditory stimuli from 217 psychophysical experiments published in JASA between 1950 and 2017. Our survey documents a disproportionate focus on simplistic sounds, with less than 4% of psychophysical experiments using stimuli exhibiting the dynamic temporal structures characteristic of natural auditory events. We will discuss the implications of these findings in the content of ongoing areas of inquiry of broad relevance to the auditory perception community.