Analysis and Re-Synthesis of Natural Cricket Sounds Assessing the Perceptual Relevance of Idiosyncratic Parameters

Abstract

Cricket sounds are usually regarded as pleasant and, thus, can be used as suitable test signals in psychoacoustic experiments assessing the human listening acuity to specific temporal and spectral features. In addition, the simple structure of cricket sounds makes them prone to reverse engineering such that they can be analyzed and re-synthesized with desired alterations in their defining parameters. This paper describes cricket sounds from a parametric point of view, characterizes their main temporal and spectral features, namely jitter, shimmer and frequency sweeps, and explains a re-synthesis process generating modified natural cricket sounds. These are subsequently used in listening tests helping to shed light on the sound identification and discrimination capabilities of humans that are important, for example, in voice recognition.