Auditory recognition of floor surfaces by temporal and spectral cues of walking

In a multiple choice auditory experimental task, listeners had to discriminate walks over floors made of concrete, wood, gravel, or dried twigs. Sound stimuli were obtained by mixing temporal and spectral signal components, resulting in hybrid formulations of such materials. In this way we analyzed the saliency of the corresponding cues of time and frequency in the recognition of a specific floor. Results show that listeners differently weigh such cues during recognition, however this tendency is not polarized enough to enable interaction designers to reduce the functionality of a walking sound synthesizer to simple operations made on the temporal or spectral domain depending on the simulated material.