Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We experience our soundscape in terms of physical events; for instance, a friend sweeping up after a plate crashed onthe floor. The underlying perceptual inferences are typically ill-posed: without constraints, there are infinite possiblecauses of the observed sound. Thus, a core task for cognitive science is specifying the variables we perceive along withthe constraints that allow them to be estimated. We identified sustained contact sounds (e.g., hands rubbing together,scraping a pan) as a rich domain with which to explore perceptual constraints. We developed a simple physics-basedsound-synthesis model that can generate a diverse set of realistic scraping sounds. We find that listeners perceive thegenerative physical variables from scraping sounds, including velocity, motion trajectory, and surface roughness. Furtherexperiments and acoustic analyses will address whether perception is constrained by a holistic generative model of soundor by invariant features that specify each perceived variable.