Presented at the 19th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2013) on July 6-9, 2013 in Lodz, Poland.While visual saliency models are approaching maturity, their
auditory counterparts remain in their infancy. This is mainly due
to the difficulties of gathering basic data, and oversimplifications
such as an assumption of monaural signals. Moreover, conventional
testing approaches for evaluating auditory saliency models
tend to be overly simplistic.
To address these shortcomings, we developed an experimental
procedure for testing auditory saliency along with more formalized
stimulus-selection criteria to support more versatile and ecologically
relevant saliency models. This work is described, along
with an analysis of some relevant acoustical correlates that emerge
from the experiments. The results motivate the formulation of a
measure of sound complexity and appear to favor time-domain,
rather than frequency-domain analysis to describe saliency. Finally,
some conclusions are drawn regarding the definition of an
expanded feature set to be used for auditory saliency modeling and
prediction in the context of natural, everyday sounds
