The vOICe Animation samples

Kitchen cabinet door closed and open

Apparently, you can hear whether the cabinet door is open, which was the main thing here. Furthermore, the kitchen is part of a familiar daily environment (my environment, in this case) and it is therefore not really required to understand the soundscapes from scratch through pattern recognition in order to know the difference between door open and door closed: having observed the difference once, you only need to perceive the best match the next time you enter the kitchen to know what's happening. You already know that it could only be the door of the cabinet and probably not the trunk of an elephant hanging from the ceiling.

Although your endangered forehead is still several meters away from the cabinet door, and things are generally more "pronounced" in the soundscapes when you get closer, there is more that can be heard with this example, even if barely at this distance.

Turn off the animation using the <Animate> checkbox, and switch back and forth between the two soundscapes using the left and right arrow/cursor keys on your keyboard. (You sometimes need to click in the green applet background area first: this informs the applet that it is no longer the browser itself that should handle these two keys.) This will make it easier to perceive the more subtle sound differences. Of course you can always use the <Mute> button to turn sound on and off as desired, because the sounds are not really pleasing, and it is usually good to use "ordinary sonic clues" as well - if only to hear the water boiling in the kettle! (Not in these photographs, by the way.)

Now you can even hear the open door's grip in the open door frame, involving just two bright pixels in a very complicated soundscape. If you have difficulty perceiving it, try drawing with your mouse a few bright pixels at the same elevation but a bit to the left of the grip, and the repetition of two short beeps will help noticing it consciously. You can wipe out (undo) what you have just drawn using the right mouse button.

Similarly, you can hear the vertical right edge of the open door and the slanted bright cabinet edge behind the open door. You will most likely experience that your hearing system is actually passing on much more information to your brain than you would normally be aware of, because it indeed takes some effort to hear these details, but they are there all right! Concentration wouldn't have helped to hear things if they had been blocked already by the peripheral hearing system itself. It's just that our brain has certain habits in filtering things out, and the question arises again whether the brain can be (un)trained to do its focussing of attention (filtering) differently and more appropriately for getting the useful information from these soundscapes.

Thanks go to William Loughborough for raising the cabinet door issue. A talking sign, guide dog or long cane wouldn't have helped with an indoor situation like this.

Walking towards door in wooden fence

Try turning off the animation using the <Animate> checkbox, and move backward and forward with the left and right arrow/cursor keys. Notice the characteristic ``rhythm'' of the fence boarding as you approach it, and the ``drop-out'' of the dark door that dominates the soundscape as you get closer. The door posts give very marked noises when you get close, making it easy to find the centre of the doorway. Also pay attention to the rising pitch of the soft background sounds when you are still far away from the fence, because these sounds represent visual perspective and in fact tell you that the road and pavement run away from you on your right side: you don't need to ``shoreline'' in order to know where the road is going.

The high-pitched ``slice of air'' at the top of some of the frames tells you approximately where the border between the house and the fence is, while this slice is briefly interrupted by the lamp-post. In the first two frames the small tree also gives a brief sound interruption that would have become more marked if we had walked closer towards it.

Some other items that are easily perceived are the window of the house (first floor), and the leftmost bright corner section of the fence. Again, as explained before, these things are not necessarily understood unless you know the local area. Perceiving and understanding are not the same thing, but knowledge of context, when available, can help enormously in bringing the two together.

Walking towards and between two parked cars

The last frame shows the marked sound texture of a wooden flower ``climbing frame'' attached to the wall. The bright rectangle in front is an empty flower box.

Sonar systems often fail on parked cars, because most energy of the ultrasound beams is reflected at the smooth metal surfaces in directions away from the sonar system and there is therefore the risk that the highly visible obstacle thus goes (largely) undetected.

As a further technical (not yet perceptual!) verification of information preservation, you may have a look at the animation reconstruction experiment.

Walking towards and through dark passage

There are various other visual structures and effects of perspective that you can find out for yourself here. Note that describing all these visual features in words would generally take a lot of time, much more than the actual duration of the evolving soundscapes. Because we want to move on, we wouldn't want to wait for an elaborate spoken description, and need a concise soundscape ``description'' that keeps pace with our own movement and the typical rates of change in our visual environment.