Environmental sound description : comparison and generalization of 4 timbre studies

The aim of this study is to adapt the principles of sound timbre description, originally used for musical sounds, to environmental sounds. In order to reach this goal, we inventoried 4 timbre studies of diverse environmental sounds in terms of stimuli, experiments and perceptual results. Then, we tried to systematize sound description by comparing the different perceptual spaces in order to identify the main environmental sound classes and their associated timbre spaces. Thus, we identified three main environmental sound classes within our sound dataset: impact sounds, motor sounds and instrument-like sounds. These three classes each have their own timbre space. We finally used perceptually relevant acoustic features to explain these timbre spaces, according to the main acoustic specificities that define each sound class. We found that the brightness feature is used to discriminate sounds in several classes, while other particular features are used within each class.