Pittsburgh Natural Sounds

A set of sound files recorded around the Pittsburgh region combining ambient sounds (rain, wind, streams) with acoustic transients (snapping twigs, breaking wood, rock impacts).

Key features

natural sounds, transient sounds, ambient sounds, 44 kHz.

Description

50 separate recordings of "natural" sounds from various environments, including both anechoic chamber recordings of isolated sounds and "uncontrolled" recordings made in park settings. Recording was carried out using a M-Audio's MobilePre-USB 16-bit/48 KS/s USB-powered Microphone Pre-amp (link), with all recordings made at 44100 Hz. The files here are the original files, without any preprocessing.

Download

The dataset consists of a mixed set of variable length .wav files. The files are packaged in a zipped archive:
PittSounds.zip (88mb).

Acknowledgment

The construction of this dataset was supported by National Institutes of Health training grant MH19983 and by National Science Foundation training grant DGE-9987588.

If you use this data set, please cite the following paper.

Smith, E., & Lewicki, M.
Efficient auditory coding.
Nature, 2006, vol.439, pp.800-805. [pdf] [bib]

@article{Smith-Lewicki-06,
author = {Smith, E. C. and Lewicki, M.},
title = {Efficient auditory coding},
journal = {Nature},
volume = {439},
number = {7079},
pages = {800-805},
year = {2006} }

If you have any questions about this dataset, please email evan at cnbc.cmu.edu.