Presence of 1/f noise in the temporal structure of psychoacoustic parameters of natural and urban sounds

Abstract

1/f noise or pink noise, which has been shown to be universal in nature, has also been observed in the temporal envelope of music, speech, and environmental sound. Moreover, the slope of the spectral density of the temporal envelope of music has been shown to correlate well to its pleasing, dull, or chaotic character. In this paper, the temporal structure of a number of instantaneous psychoacoustic parameters of environmental sound is examined in order to investigate whether a 1/f temporal structure appears in various types of sound that are generally preferred by people in everyday life. The results show, to some extent, that different categories of environmental sounds have different temporal structure characteristics. Only a number of urban sounds considered and birdsong, generally, exhibit 1/f behavior on short to medium duration time scales, i.e., from 0.1s to 10s, in instantaneous loudness and sharpness, whereas a more chaotic variation is found in birdsong at longer time scales, i.e., of 10s-200s. The other sound categories considered exhibit random or monotonic variations in the different time scales. In general, this study shows that a 1/f temporal structure is not necessarily present in environmental sounds that are commonly perceived as pleasant.