Abstract:

Recent psychophysical studies of cue-based sound localization have, to the most part, considered clearcut characteristics of source sound stimulus, such as bandwidth and general spectral characteristics (flat and randomized intensity components in noise, presence and absence of transient onset, narrow and broad frequency bands, choice of noise (mainly pink and white) or simple and Gaussian tones. This article suggests that other source sound characterizations and procedures should begin to come into play in such studies. Even though the avoidance of complex sound input is generally taken as a guarantee of more reliable analysis, as it reduces the scope of a sound's mutable temporal and spatial structure to avoid analytical confusion, recent music's conceptual groundings such as "harmonicity" and degree of temporal periodicity, regulated in different possible forms at source sounds, may bring new directions for experiments to come, as they rely on more subtle or more "realistic" levels of sonic changes.