Studying environmental sounds the Watson way

After years of research on laboratory‐generated complex sounds, in the early 1990s Chuck Watson and colleagues in the Hearing and Communications Laboratory (HCL) became interested in whether sounds with some meaning to the listener were processed differently by the auditory system. So began in his lab a program of environmental sounds research, in the meticulous, deliberate manner Watson was known for. The first step was developing an addition to the Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities (TBAC) which would measure individual differences in the identification of familiar environmental sounds. Next came the psychophysical basics: detection and identification in noise. Then, borrowing a page from early speech researchers, the effects of low‐, high‐, and bandpass filtering on environmental sounds were investigated, as well as those of processing environmental sounds using vocoder methods. Work has continued outside the HCL on developing a standardized canon of environmental sounds for generalized testing, with an aim to creating diagnostic tests for environmental sounds similar to the SPIN and modified rhyme and reverberation (MRRT).