Identification of natural and man-made sounds in various scene complexities with temporal and spatial separation

The present investigation revisited fundamental principles of auditory scene analysis via detection, discrimination, and identification of natural and man-made sounds. Soundscapes, both urban and natural, often contain multiple competing sound sources. An experiment was conducted to investigate if temporal or spatial spreading of concurrent sounds would improve identification accuracy. This paper presents an analysis of natural and man-made sounds and examines their impact on the identification accuracy considering scene complexity and presentation format. Results suggest that sounds with longer effective duration and later energy peak tend to get identified more accurately, in both natural and man-made sounds.