In the parlance of sound engineers there is something called "room tone" — the auditory impression of silence in a certain chamber.
A common phenomenon is the auditory impression that a blowing automobile horn changes its pitch as it passes an observer on a highway.
However, the term "whispery" is also used in the paper, when the auditory impression of the turbulent noise is closer to whisper, rather than to normal phonation.
In the present work, considering that our voice quality data is based on auditory impression, we use the terms "breathy" and "breathiness" in a broad sense, indicating all utterances where turbulent noise is audibly perceived in the vowel segments.
Although breathy and whispery voices have distinct definitions in terms of the phonation settings, they are often confused, probably because they are similarly characterized by the auditory impression of turbulent noise (aspiration noise).
Moreover, because the acoustic properties of sounds induce auditory impressions in listeners, onomatopoeic representations and the auditory impressions associated with actual sounds may be related.
The auditory imagery of onomatopoeic representations was compared with the auditory impressions for their corresponding actual sound stimuli, which were obtained in our previous study [7].
Knowing more about the relationship between the onomatopoeic features and auditory impressions of sounds is useful because such knowledge allows one to more accurately obtain or describe the auditory imagery of sounds without actually hearing or emitting them.
In the present paper, therefore, we took sound source recognition into consideration while comparing the auditory imagery of onomatopoeic representations to the auditory impressions induced by their corresponding real sounds.
However, as shown in Figure 1(c), the auditory imagery of onomatopoeic stimuli containing voiced consonants (i.e., nos. 26 and 35) was different from the auditory impressions evoked by real sounds.
In our previous study [7], 8 participants were aurally presented with 36 environmental sounds, and their auditory impressions of sound stimuli were evaluated.
