ALARM/WILL/SOUND: Perception, Characterization, Acoustic Modeling, and Design of Modified Car Alarms

This article outlines the salient phases, goals, and results of alarm/will/sound, a multidisciplinary musical research project carried out in the context of the IRCAM IRC (Interface Recherche-Création) Musical Residency Research program. After the rationale for and motivations behind the project are presented, the following research and production milestones are described: 1) the elaboration and characterization of the sound corpus intended for the modified car alarm prototypes; 2) a sound perception experiment testing source typicality of a sub-category of sounds within the corpus; 3) an acoustic descriptor space in which a subset of the stimuli employed in the typicality experiment were situated; 4) the construction of synthetic auditory warnings from sound-sources within the descriptor space, prototypical environmental sound envelopes, and inter-onset intervals (IOI's) derived from extant car alarms; and 5) the design of a second experiment pertaining to levels of repulsion vs. attraction to the synthetic auditory warnings. Finally, short-, mid-, and long-term objectives and directions for the project are discussed.