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- Title
Listener perception of single-shot small arms fire.
- Authors
Gaston, Jeremy R.; Letowski, Tomasz R.
- Abstract
The ability to identify and interpret impulse sounds from small arms weapons fire is a very important element of soldier's situational awareness that is critically needed to avoid potential danger. For example, differentiation of hostile from friendly weapons fire can indicate the need for increased vigilance and can reveal the approximate location of an enemy element. In addition, estimation of weapon size can be used to infer the resources of an enemy element. Despite the potential operational importance of these sounds, little is known about listener perception of impulse weapons sounds. The present work investigates listener ability to differentiate signatures of various small arms weapons on the basis of high-quality recordings of single-shot impulse sounds. Experiment 1 measured listener perceived similarity for paired small arms impulse sounds. A multi-dimensional scaling solution (MDS) based on listener ratings showed significant overlap in perceptual space for most rifle sounds, but the mappings of handgun sounds were largely segregated from all rifle sounds. These mappings correlated well with measured source and sound properties of the small arms weapons. Experiment 2 measured discrimination performance for selected sets of contrasted weapon pairings. In general, discrimination performance correlated well with the listener perceptual space measured in Experiment 1, with best performance for handgun-rifle pairings and worst performance for rifle-rifle pairings.
- Subjects
BATTLE sounds; MILITARY weapons; LISTENING; MULTIDIMENSIONAL scaling; AUDITORY perception; SENSORY perception; PSYCHOLOGY
- Publication
Noise Control Engineering Journal, 2012, Vol 60, Issue 3, p236
- ISSN
0736-2501
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3397/1.3701001