Understanding auditory intuitive physics
Joshua H. McDermott, Vinayak Agarwal, Fernanda De La Torre, James A. Traer · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023
Sound is often caused by physical interactions between objects. Humans have some ability to discern these interactions by listening. This talk will describe our lab’s efforts to understand these perceptual inferences. Our research involves three inter-related approaches. First, we make physical and acoustic measurements of everyday objects and surfacesto characterize the sound of real-world objects. Second, we develop methods to synthesize sounds from physical interactions (impacts, scrapes, and rolls). Third, we use these sounds to investigate the perceptual processes and representations underlying auditory intuitive physics. The results reveal regularities in object sounds that have been internalized by humans and that are used to infer object properties and physical events from sound.