The Sonic Mapper

by Gary P. Scavone

Introduction

The Sonic Mapper is a program that offers three different sound comparison tasks, including two-dimensional similarity mapping, sorting, and traditional pairwise comparisons. The program is designed as a tool for conducting sound similarity experiments with human subjects and provides a wide-range of experiment settings. The Sonic Mapper was developed by Gary P. Scavone using Qt for the user interface and RtAudio for audio output. It is supported on Macintosh OS-X, Windows, and Linux operating systems.

Download

Binaries:

OS-X Intel (updated 28 May 2018)
Windows (updated 23 April 2019)
Linux (available upon request)

Screenshots

The similarity mapping interface is shown in Figure 1. The user drags sound items from the dispenser in the lower right corner and places them in the two-dimensional space based on some specified criteria. Groups of items can be enclosed within "grouping boxes". While the interface was designed for sound similarity tests, it has also been used for sound localization tasks.

Figure 1: Sound similarity mapping interface.

The sorting interface is shown in Figure 2. The user drags sound items from the dispenser in the lower right corner and places them into "bins". The task can be configured to specify a minimum and maximum number of possible bins. Each bin name can be changed during the experiment by the user. The task can also be configured to require hierarchical sorting of bins when all sound items have been sorted.

Figure 2: Sound sorting interface.

A screenshot of the pairwise comparison interface is shown below. The task can be configured to require either a "full-matrix" or "half-matrix" set of comparisons.

Figure 3: Pairwise comparison interface.