Everyday sounds: synthesis parameters and perceptual correlates

Environmental sounds present a difficult problem for sound modeling because spectral and temporal cues are tightly correlated. These sounds form classes that cannot be handled by traditional synthesis methods. Micro-level representations provide ways to control spectral and spatial cues in sound synthesis and meso-level representations determine the temporal structure of sound events. By constraining the synthesis parameter space to ecologically meaningful ranges and defining parametric transformations along perceptually relevant dimensions we are able to model sound events at the micro and meso level. The integration of these approaches into a coherent data structure extends the parameter space of ecological models to the domain of spectral and spatial cues.