Innovative Tools for Sound Sketching Combining Vocalizations and Gestures

2016

International audience; Designers are used to produce a variety of physical and digital representations at different stages of the design process. These intermediary objects (IOs) do support the externalization of ideas and the mediation with the different stakeholders. In the same manner, sound designers deliver several intermediate sounds to their clients, through iteration and refinement. In fact, these preliminary sounds are sound sketches representing the intermediate steps of an evolving creation. In this paper we reflect on the method of sketching sounds through vocalizations and gestures, and how a technological support, grounded in the understanding of the design practice, can fost…

Combining gestures and vocalizations to imitate sounds

2015

International audience; Communicating about sounds is a difficult task without a technical language, and naïve speakers often rely on different kinds of non-linguistic vocalizations and body gestures (Lemaitre et al. 2014). Previous work has independently studied how effectively people describe sounds with gestures or vocalizations (Caramiaux, 2014, Lemaitre and Rocchesso, 2014). However, speech communication studies suggest a more intimate link between the two processes (Kendon, 2004). Our study thus focused on the combination of manual gestures and non-speech vocalizations in the communication of sounds. We first collected a large database of vocal and gestural imitations of a variety of …

Outils innovants pour la création d’esquisses sonores combinant vocalisations et gestes

Les designers produisent différents types de représentations physiques et/ou digitales lors des différentes phases d'un processus de design. Ces objets intermédiaires de représentation permettent et supportent l'incarnation des idées du designer, de les externaliser, mais aussi la médiation entre les personnes qui sont impliquées dans les différentes phases du design (designers produits, ingénieurs, marketing, ...). Les designers sonores, eux aussi, produisent des sons intermédiaires pour les présenter aux commanditaires par un processus itératif de raffinement de ces propositions. Ainsi ces différents sons intermédiaires sont des esquisses sonores qui représentent les différentes étapes in…

Embodied sound design

2018

Abstract Embodied sound design is a process of sound creation that involves the designer’s vocal apparatus and gestures. The possibilities of vocal sketching were investigated by means of an art installation. An artist–designer interpreted several vocal self-portraits and rendered the corresponding synthetic sketches by using physics-based and concatenative sound synthesis. Both synthesis techniques afforded a broad range of artificial sound objects, from concrete to abstract, all derived from natural vocalisations. The vocal-to-synthetic transformation process was then automated in SEeD, a tool allowing to set and play interactively with physics- or corpus-based sound models. The voice-dri…