Combining gestures and vocalizations to imitate sounds
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 …
On Analytical vs . Schizophrenic Procedures for Computing Music
The authors present a perspective on computer music, which is based on some particular definitions of music in relation to oral culture and cybernetics. They describe some experiments with different models of neural architectures which generate original music, and then suggest that if such neural systems are rich, effective and intuitive enough to produce ‘live’ music, the understanding of their behaviour may require the development of some ‘schizophrenic’ procedures, as well as analytical ones.
Comparing identification of vocal imitations and computational sketches of everyday sounds
International audience; Sounds are notably difficult to describe. It is thus not surprising that human speakers often use many imitative vocalizations to communicate about sounds. In practice,vocal imitations of non-speech everyday sounds (e.g. the sound of a car passing by) arevery effective: listeners identify sounds better with vocal imitations than with verbal descriptions, despite the fact that vocal imitations are often inaccurate, constrained by the human vocal apparatus. The present study investigated the semantic representations evoked by vocal imitations by experimentally quantifying how well listeners could match sounds to category labels. Itcompared two different types of sounds…