Abstract
Sound events are sequences of closely grouped and temporally related environmental sounds that tell a story or establish a sense of place. The goal of our project was to create a set of sound events depicting various scenarios (such as a car accident, cooking breakfast, and walking outdoors) and to gather normative data about how people understand them. Samples of college students listened to 22 sound events over headphones in three self-paced, computer-based studies. In theIdentification Task, 43 participants used text boxes to type descriptions of what was happening in the sound events. In theRating Task, 39 participants used Likert scales to rate the sound events on the attributes of familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness. In theMemory Task, 42 participants answered two multiple-choice questions immediately after listening to each sound event. Detailed tables are provided for the following: (1) Description of the sound events and their components; (2) accuracy and response time measurements for each of the 22 sound events across the three studies; and (3) rank-orderings of the sound events by ease of identification, recognition of details, and rated familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness. Digital files of the stimuli, which may be of interest to auditory cognition researchers and clinical neuropsychologists, may be downloaded from either www.psychonomic.org/archive or www.cofc.edu/~marcellm/sound event studies/sndevent.htm.
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An earlier version of this project was presented as a poster at the August 2005 meeting of the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC. We thank the undergraduate psychology students at the College of Charleston who participated in our study. Questions, comments, or suggestions about this article should be directed to M. Marcell, Department of Psychology, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424
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Marcell, M., Malatanos, M., Leahy, C. et al. Identifying, rating, and remembering environmental sound events. Behavior Research Methods 39, 561–569 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193026
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193026