Presented at the 20th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2014), June 22-25, 2014, New York, NY.Machine classification of underwater sounds remains an
important focus of U.S. Naval research due to physical and
environmental factors that increase false alarm rates. Human
operators tend to be reliably better at this auditory task than
automated methods, but the attentional properties of this
cognitive discrimination skill are not well understood. In the
study presented here, pairs of isolated listeners, who were only
allowed to talk to each other, were given a collaborative soundordering
task in which only words and phrases could be used to
refer to and identify a set of impulsive sonar echoes. The
outcome supports the premise that verbal descriptions of
unfamiliar sounds are often difficult for listeners to
immediately grasp. The method of “collaborative referring”
used in the study is proposed as new technique for obtaining a
verified perceptual vocabulary for a given set of sounds and for
studying human aural identification and discrimination skills