0000000000396786

AUTHOR

Patrick Susini

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 …

research product

Temporal weighting of loudness: Comparison between two different psychophysical tasks

International audience; Psychophysical studies on loudness have so far examined the temporal weighting of loudness solely in level-discrimination tasks. Typically, listeners were asked to discriminate hundreds of level-fluctuating sounds regarding their global loudness. Temporal weights, i.e., the importance of each temporal portion of the stimuli for the loudness judgment, were then estimated from listeners' responses. Consistent non-uniform " u-shaped " temporal weighting patterns were observed, with greater weights assigned to the first and the last temporal portions of the stimuli, revealing significant primacy and recency effects, respectively. In this study, the question was addressed…

research product

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…

research product

Sketching Sound with Voice and Gesture

Voice and gestures are natural sketching tools that can be exploited to communicate sonic interactions. In product and interaction design, sounds should be included in the early stages of the design process. Scientists of human motion have shown that auditory stimuli are important in the performance of difficult tasks and can elicit anticipatory postural adjustments in athletes. These findings justify the attention given to sound in interaction design for gaming, especially in action and sports games that afford the development of levels of virtuosity. The sonic manifestations of objects can be designed by acting on their mechanical qualities and by augmenting the objects with synthetic and…

research product