# Auditory Sketches- Very Sparse Representations of Sounds Are Stil recognisable **Abstract:** OPEN ACCESS Citation: Isnard V, Taffou M, Viaud-Delmon I, Suied C (2016) Auditory Sketches: Very Sparse Representations of Sounds Are Still Recognizable. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0150313. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0150313 Editor: Trevor Bruce Penney, National University of Singapore, SINGAPORE Received: August 7, 2015 Accepted: February 11, 2016 Published: March 7, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Isnard et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Sounds in our environment like voices, animal calls or musical instruments are easily recognized by human listeners. Understanding the key features underlying this robust sound recognition is an important question in auditory science. Here, we studied the recognition by human listeners of new classes of sounds: acoustic and auditory sketches, sounds that are severely impoverished but still recognizable. Starting from a time-frequency representation, a sketch is obtained by keeping only sparse elements of the original signal, here, by means of a simple peak-picking algorithm. Two time-frequency representations were compared: a biologically grounded one, the auditory spectrogram, which simulates peripheral auditory filtering, and a simple acoustic spectrogram, based on a Fourier transform. Three degrees of sparsity were also investigated. Listeners were ask **Authors:** [[Isnard, Vincent; Taffou, Marine; Viaud]]