natural non-speech sound corpus?

[Kevin Baker <klb@xxxxxxxxx>]

Does any one know whether there exists a corpus of recorded natural
non-speech sounds which may be useful for research purposes?

In discussion with a colleague and a grad student, I suggested that using
a collection of non-speech sounds to test listeners judgments of sound
categories may be analogous to using speech databases (eg TIMIT etc).  The
benefit would be that the results could be compared to other studies using
different methods or looking at other aspects of auditory perception
using similar or the same stimuli.

My suspicion is that such a corpus does not exist because research into
the perception of natural non-speech sounds (such as doors slamming,
footsteps, hand claps) is rare and as yet undeveloped to the level of
knowledge we have about linguistic sounds.

Could anyone comment on this?  Offer any help?

Kevin L. Baker

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