Noise & Toys (PROBES podcasts)

There is a series of podcasts looking at specific areas of music and sound, curated by Chris Cutler - https://rwm.macba.cat/en/probes_tag

For each episode, you can stream or download the main podcast and an extra auxiliary episode which offers further musical examples. You can also download the transcription of every episode as a pdf.

An example is episode 24, which looks specifically at the use of toys such as the toy piano in recorded music. You can access it HERE

Meaning From Environmental Sounds: Types of Signal–Referent Relations and Their Effect on Recognizing Auditory Icons

Meaning From Environmental Sounds: Types of Signal–Referent Relations and Their Effect on Recognizing Auditory Icons 

Peter Keller and Catherine Stevens University of Western Sydney

This article addresses the learnability of auditory icons, that is, environmental sounds that refer either directly or indirectly to meaningful events. Direct relations use the sound made by the target event whereas indirect relations substitute a surrogate for the target. Across 3 experiments, different indirect relations (ecological, in which target and surrogate coexist in the world; metaphorical, in which target and surrogate have similar appearance or function, and random) were compared with one another and with direct relations on measures including associative strength ratings, amount of exposure required for learning, and response times for recognizing icons. Findings suggest that performance is best with direct relations, worst with random relations, and that ecological and metaphorical relations involve distinct types of association but do not differ in learnability




FULL TEXT

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 2004, Vol. 10, No. 1, 3–12 1076-898X/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1076-898X.10.1.3