Categorisation is a fundamental cognitive process that plays a central role inudeveryday behaviour and action. Whereas previous studies have investigated theudcategorisation of isolated everyday sounds, this paper presents an experiment toudinvestigate the cognitive categorisation of everyday sounds within their originaludcontext. A group of eighteen expert and non-expert listeners took part in a freeudsorting task using 110 sounds identified within ambisonic reproductions of urbanudsoundscapes. The participants were asked to sort the objects into groups ofudsounds that served a similar purpose in the overall perception of the soundscape.udFollowing this, the participants were asked to provide descriptive labels for theudgroups they had formed. The results were analysed using hierarchical agglomerativeudclustering and non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) to exploreudboth the structure and dimensionality of the data. The resulting hierarchicaludclustering of objects show three top level categories relating to transient sounds,udcontinuous sounds, and speech and vocalisations. Sub-categories were identifiedudin each of the top level categories which included harmonic and non-harmonicudcontinuous sounds, clear speech, unintelligible speech, vocalisations, transientudsounds that indicate actions, and non-salient transient sounds. The first twouddimensions revealed by the MDS analysis relate to temporal extent and intelligibilityudrespectively. Interpretation of the third dimension is less clear, but may be related to harmonic content.
展开▼
