| Résumé |
People have a remarkable capacity to quickly and efficiently understand certain aspects of the current state of th
e world based on the behavior of sound-producing objects, even those outside the field of vision. Early work on th
e subjective representation of sound events consisted of correlating abstract perceptual parameters (timbre) with
parameters stemming from spectral analyses (attack time, spectral center of gravity, etc.) by means of multidimens
ional scaling (MDS) analysis (1). These analytic spectro-temporal parameters were based on a simplified representa
tion of the acoustic signal, which may not account completely for the complexity of human perception. The principa
l objective of the work presented here was to attempt to find a direct link, if possible, between the physical nat
ure of the vibrating object that produces sound events and the perception of that object by listeners. We thus hyp
othesized that the perceptual system should be sensitive to aspects of the acoustic environment that have biologic
al importance for the listener or that have acquired a particular value through auditory experience with sounds of
the daily environment. Such an approach has been already used in a discrimination paradigm (2), but without simul
ating sounds with a physical model, thus impeding the establishment of a direct link between perceptual dimensions
and source properties.
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