INVESTIGATIONS WITH THE SONIC BROWSER ON TWO OF THE PERCEPTUAL AUDITORY DIMENSIONS OF SOUND OBJECTS: ELASTICITY AND FORCE

The Sonic Browser is a software tool developed especially for navigating among sounds in a 2-D space, primarily through listening. It could be used for managing large collections of sounds, but now it is turning out to be useful also for conducting psychophysical experiments, aiming at investigating perceptual dimension scaling of sounds. We used it for analyzing the relationship between the physical parameters involved in the sound synthesis and for studying the quality of the sounds generated by the SOb models. Some experiments in this direction have been already reported [1, 2], examining real and model generated sounds of impacts and bounces of objects made with different materials. In this paper, we introduce our further investigations, by analyzing perceptually the impacts and bounces sounds from a different perspective, focusing on other two perceptual dimensions, i.e elasticity of the event and the force applied to the dropped object. We will describe the new experiment we conducted and we will report the collected data, by analyzing the resulting perceptual evaluation spaces.