Auditory textures are recognized through their spectrotemporal statistics despite highly variable local structure

Evidence

Many natural sounds have spectrotemporal signatures only on a statistical level, e.g. wind, fire or rain. While their local structure is highly variable, the spectrotemporal statistics of these auditory textures can be used for recognition. This suggests the existence of a neural representation of these statistics. To explore their encoding, we investigated the detectability of changes in the spectral statistics in relation to the properties of the change. To achieve precise parameter control, we designed a minimal sound texture—a modified cloud of tones—which retains the central property of auditory textures: solely statistical predictability. Listeners had to rapidly detect a change in the frequency marginal probability of the tone cloud occurring at a random time. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3280

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the concept of soundscape keynotes and how the ear extracts statistical regularities from ambient sound.