Sound recordings quiz!

Our lives are filled with the buzzing and beeping of electronics and other machinery. But just how familiar are we? If your life depended on knowing the difference between the sounds of an ATM or a ticket dispenser, would you make it? How about the difference between a jet engine and a hard drive? Enjoy our sound recordings quiz, produced with our pals at


  1. This quiz confirmed what I suspected… my sense of hearing is going downhill fast.

    That, and I am a relative Luddite.

  2. This is something I’ve thought about quite a lot. We depend on our vision too much, even our language is full of metaphoric references to our sense of sight, such as to perceive or understand being expressed as: “I see!”.

    I wonder if this reliance is actually a weakness, and the point you are making here shows me that our senses of perception through other senses especially hearing are. neglected to the point where it could be just this.

  3. additional interesting questions are:
    how much does the picture/text (or lack of a picture) influence us?
    (different test conditions with a pic matching sound, not matching or no picture).
    And other test conditions from this concept might be interesting.

    Priming baby, yeah!

  4. I took the quiz with my eyes closed and scored 50%. I did read the description before playing the sound, so I suppose I may have been influenced by what I expected the sound to be.

  5. 1) Typo, first word in summary.

    2) 83%!

    3) Y’know, some mechanical sounds are very specific… Some one could have played it safe and answered “No” (as in, “No, it’s not the sound of THAT particular model of scanner”) to all questions. Your score for adopting that strategy: 10/13…

    4) Should have given say two or three choices plus a “None”

  6. I scored 50% as well. I suppose that is alright considering the iPhone has become a credible source of video and audio…
    (I know it’s someone’s little page and all that, but there is plenty of audio in the sub 500 to 250 Hz region that we use to distinguish what objects are. It’s like when people record videos or modified cars on Youtube with a camera phone it sounds like shit. Why would I want to listen to a Borla catback setup on something with an audio range of 1-4k Hz?)

    And the industrial robot, we have a couple of those at work. They don’t make that much noise. Mostly shwooshing (then again there is a fair amount of background noise….)

  7. Unfair test, sound is about distance too. The very poor sound quality from using a cell phone as a source (real microphones cost money for a reason), random unfamiliar gadgets and unknown distances (1″ from source for HD vs 40 feet from jet) all make this pretty unfair.

    Or I’m just mad because I got a 66%

    1. Seeing is also about perspective and distances and our monitors display only flat images. Actually so is smelling as you judge intensities, so not unfair in this example I think.

    1. A multi CD changer is a device that holds several CDs and allows you to play any of them. Usually they’re found in cars, and they usually take an astonishingly long time to switch between CDs because they store them in a rack like you see in the picture.

      1. I know. My point was just, I’ve never heard a multi-CD changer operate (because they’re in the trunk) and I’ve only ever seen one or two. I’ve never seen an industrial robot. I haven’t used a flat-bed scanner in over a decade. I’ve never operated a parking gate, or a parking ticket dispenser.

        And as others have said, ATMs and copy machines aren’t exactly uniform-sounding.

        What a silly test.

  8. Does that sound like one of the six printers at my office? No… Does it sound like the ATM at my bank? No… Does it sound like my camera? No… but I suppose it could be any of those things from another brand/bank/model… Not really sure what this test is testing.

  9. I’m trying to figure out what a good control test would look like for a more scientific study on suggestiveness of sounds.

    For example, what if there was no text/image prompt. Just a fill in the blank, “What is the sound”
    text prompt “Is this an ATM machine?”
    text and image prompt (like this quiz)

    Do you have the same people take variations? Do you then have to use different samples to avoid recognition? Then, how would you account for if certain sounds are harder to identify than others? Do you instead use a different set of people for each variation? If so, how do you identify a base performance level for each group?

    Does order matter? His answers suggested he thought the CD changer was easy. I got it wrong, but I admit by that point, I was more skimming through.

  10. I would have been fun to do an A/B study where you give half the players no hints before hearing the sound. After the first question I could tell both the text and the image where screwing my judgement. Though after doing the test ‘blind’ I scored 67% which I think is pretty good considering I’ve rarely if ever encountered many of these sounds.

    It would have been great to have more general sounds. Your ATM, printer, copier and especially your camera all sound broken to me.

    What kind of fantastic sound quiz would a veteran Foley artist put together?

  11. I did ok overall (75%) but on the ones where I was correct about the sound not matching the picture, I was astonishingly bad at guessing what it was.

    I would have sworn the hand dryer at #3 was a circular saw.

  12. … I’ve never had a car so all the car related ones wheren’t really working, never used an ATM (ours sound different, allot different more like a “fshwoooop”).

    Also many of the noises sounded like assembly line robots… If that had been an option I would have gopne with that :)

  13. “Jet Engine” didn’t fool me at all.

    I was pretty sure at least one of them was an autotuned wookie, though.

  14. As a sound designer, I found this quiz very interesting. I regularly have to create sounds to match footage that has no sound for one reason or another. I often use/choose sounds that are not the real sound of the item in question, but sounds that convey they either a sense of reality or an emotion that I am trying to convey. It’s helpful for me to know how attuned to the accuracy of sounds the general public is. Thank you!

  15. 66.7%
    I found myself listening to the background noise to help determine if a lot of them where what the picture showed.

  16. 33% but then I wasn’t concentrating.

    I always get excited that the designers of tests like these might do the right thing and hit you with some cool contextualised results at the end. Sadly, this one utterly didn’t.

    Wouldn’t it have been nice to see something like:


    33% – you suck! Of 198 people that took this test, the most common result was 55%, the lowest was 12% and the highest was 98%

    Patterns so far: those that correctly guessed the copy machine noise most often correctly guess the washing machine, but incorrectly guess the CD changer. Everyone has correctly guessed the vending machine.


    Stuff that that make these tests fun. If it wasn’t for people reporting their scores and discussing it here, I’d have derived about nearly zero pleasure from doing it.

    1. That would be very awesome, yes. Sadly, I’m limited by the tool I’m using. I have yet to see a quiz tool that would work for BB and also do some of the things others have suggested in these wonderful comments.

      As technology and quiz apps improve tho, we’ll be sure to add functionality when we can.

      And for those who wanted to hear the sound and then pick from four pictures: I thought of that, but it seemed way too easy that way. Maybe I was wrong, tho… heck, I’ll be the first to admit it’s not easy pleasing everyone when it comes to format. Stay tuned for our next quiz, coming real real soon…

  17. 66.7%

    I missed on

    The Copy Machine Not
    The Jet Plane Not
    The SLR Camera
    The Parking Gate

    The plane, I should have got; the other three, I almost never use.

    98%? 55%? (100/12).

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