Saliency of environmental sounds

Abstract

In order to investigate the saliency of environmental sounds, a listening experiment using an expert panel was planned and conducted online. Based on the results of the listening test and common literature a MATLAB-model was developed, to determine saliency in auditory scenes which are composed of environmental sounds. The term saliency describes the emergence of a-in this case acoustic-feature from a given context. Therefore, a salient sound in an auditory scene attracts attention more easily than other sounds. Saliency occurs as a bottom-up process in human perception, when from a variety of information one certain auditory stream reaches a higher degree of attention. Decisive features affecting auditory attention are intensity, temporal and spectral contrasts. Using these features, a saliency map is calculated in the first step. In the next step the saliency map and blind source separation is used to calculate saliency scores. Additionally, the important features periodicity, fluctuation of sound pressure level over time, tonality and bandwidth are determined. Based on a combination of these calculations, predictions on saliency in auditory scenes composed of environmental sounds can be made.