Psychoacoustic Study of the Rock Art Sites of Cuevas de la Arana (Bicorp, Spain)

Acoustics play a crucial role in shaping our perception of sound and its emotional impact. The rock art site of Cuevas de la Arana in Bicorp, Spain, is an archaeological site where pre-historic communities gathered for social and ritual activities. Cuevas de la Arana exhibits acoustical characteristics that could have enhanced the sensory and emotional impact during ceremonies performed with music. In the present study, a listening test was conducted to assess how the acoustics of Cuevas de la Arana and other rock art sites influence modern-day listeners perception of sound. Listeners were asked to describe, using their own vocabulary, a series of auralizations created with the impulse responses collected in Cuevas de la Arana and other neighboring sites with and without rock art. The words written by participants underwent categorization through a hierarchical clustering approach. Significant results emerged indicating that listeners perceived auralizations from rock art sites as larger, wider, less direct, farther and more reverberant than the auralizations from sites lacking rock art. Notably, the most prominent disparities were observed in the categories of size, distance, and reverberation when contrasting the auralizations from Cuevas de la Arana with those of non-painted sites. These findings align with the outcomes documented in prior literature that investigated the acoustic characteristics of the sites and offer valuable insights into the auditory experiences at rock art sites, shedding light on their unique acoustic properties.