Perceptual and emotional categorization of sound

This paper investigates how different types of data from psychoacoustical experiments may be combined to render further knowledge about the mechanisms underlying sound perception. Two studies were conducted with auditory alerts of short duration. First, an experiment where participants rated the dissimilarity among the auditory alerts was performed. This resulted in a two-dimensional multi-dimensional scaling solution. Second, an experiment where participants evaluated the stimuli with semantic descriptors and rated their emotional reactions to the sounds was performed. The output of this experiment was a reduced set of underlying perceptual and emotional dimensions. The results of the two experiments were then integrated by the use of multi-dimensional perceptual unfolding and a set mediation analyses. The integrative analyses showed that part of the cognitive categorization of the semantic descriptors was mediated by the emotional reactions to the sounds. The results are discussed in relation to theories of auditory perception and emotional response categorization.