Re: environmental non-noises

[Brian Gygi <bgygi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ferenc,

I did a study a few years ago with a version of chimerical environmental 
sounds, which had the long-term spectra of one sound and the envelope of 
another. They were very interesting - they sounded like they should be 
something, but it was hard to tell what.  I can send you some code for 
making those if you like

Brian


Honbolygó Ferenc wrote:
> Dear List members,
>
> We are currently working on an experiment about the semantical 
> processing of environmental noises. We are trying to do a similar task 
> as the lexical decision task with words and nonwords, but with 
> environmental noises and "non-noises". The problem is that we have a 
> hard time creating non-noises which are quite environmental 
> noise-like, but are not recognizable. We tried almost every distortion 
> methods used in the literature (reversing, spectrally-rotating, 
> scrambling the parts) but the sounds are always pretty much 
> recognizable by most people.
> Does anyone have any idea on how to create such non-recognizable 
> non-noises based on existing environmental noises? Or is this idea 
> just not feasible, because people will always think that what they 
> heard is something real?
> Thanks,
> Ferenc Honbolygó