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Conference Paper

The Intrinsic Memorability of Everyday Sounds

Authors: Ramsay, David; Ananthabhotla, Ishwarya; Paradiso, Joseph

AES Conference: 2019 AES International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio · Paper 87 · March 2019

Abstract

Of the many sounds we encounter throughout the day, some stay lodged in our minds more easily than others; these may serve as powerful triggers of our memories. In this paper, we measure the memorability of everyday sounds across 20,000 crowd-sourced aural memory games, and then analyze the relationship between memorability and acoustic cognitive salience features; we also assess the relationship between memorability and higher-level gestalt features such as its familiarity, valence, arousal, source type, causal certainty, and verbalizability. We suggest that modeling these cognitive processes opens the door for human-inspired compression of sound environments, automatic curation of large-scale environmental recording datasets, and real-time modification of aural events to alter their likelihood of memorability.

Details

Published in
AES Conference: 2019 AES International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio
Paper number
87
Publication date
March 6, 2019
Affiliation
MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA (See document for exact affiliation information.)
Type
Conference Paper