Everyday sound. A journey through perception, cognition, interaction, and imitation of sounds that surround us
Guillaume Lemaître · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2016
This document summarizes and discusses the research I carried out since 2004. This research focused on everyday sounds: sounds of manufactured products and common events occurring in a listener’s daily environment, excluding music, speech, or other communication systems. It was motivated by an overarching question: what does audition tell listeners about their environment? In other words, this research sought to understand what exactly listeners can identify when a sound-producing event occurs in their environment, and how does the auditory system process auditory stimuli to create meaningful representations of the events. Chapter 2 starts with some initial observations made during experiments on timbre perception: even though listeners were required to concentrate on the sounds, they could not help but hear the source of the sounds. Chapter 3 then addresses the issue of sound identification. In particular, it shows that listeners are better and faster at identifying the sound-producing actions than the objects on which the actions are executed. Neuroimaging studies showed that the difficulty to identify object properties may be due to additional semantic and visual processing that is not required to identify actions. Chapter 4 then explores interactions between audition and motor behaviors and shows that hearing the sound of an action has the potential to facilitate executing that action. Finally, Chapter 5 studies another form of interaction between audition and action: vocal imitations of sounds. It shows that vocal imitations are a spontaneous means of communicating sounds and that vocal imitations effectively convey the identity of what they imitate by selecting the most relevant auditory features. The different chapters also illustrate how these results were applied to evaluate the sound quality of industrial products, design sonic interactions in computer interfaces, and develop intuitive sketching tools for sound designers.