Real, foley or synthetic? An evaluation of everyday walking sounds

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether foley sounds,
real recordings and low quality synthetic sounds can be
distinguished when used to sonify a video and if foley sounds
can be rated as more expressive than real sounds. The main
idea is to find a motivation for having such a solid tradition
in using foley sounds for a film track. In particular this
work focuses on walking sounds: five different scenes of
a walking person were video recorded and each video was
then mixed with the three different kind of sounds mentioned
above. Subjects were asked to recognise and describe
the action performed, to evaluate their confidence,
the realism of the action and its expressiveness. Early results
shows that foley sounds and real sounds cannot be
distinguished by the subjects. A preliminary audio-only
test was performed with the sounds used in the audio-video
test in order to assess the recognition rate without the visual
help.