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Urban sound management often amounts to reducing sound levels with the underlying assumption of sound/noise as a nuisance. However, a reduction in sound level does not necessarily lead to a more pleasant auditory experience, especially in urban public spaces where vibrancy can be sought after. A proactive design approach that accounts for the human experience of sound environment is needed to improve the quality of urban spaces. Recent studies in soundscape research suggest that added sound and particularly sound art installations can have a positive influence on public space evaluations. Yet, the role of added sounds in urban context remains understudied and there is no existing method to date to inform sound art composition in public space through soundscape simulation. We present here a research-creation collaboration around the design of a permanent sound installation in an urban public space in Paris: Nadine Schütz's Niches Acoustiques. We report on a series of listening tests involving High-Order Ambisonic soundscape simulations of different prototypes to inform the sound artist's composition in order to optimize the quality of public space experience in the presence of the sound installation.

Music or sound professionals use specific terminology to communicate about timbre. Some key terms do not come from the sound domain and do not have a clear definition due to their metaphorical nature. This work aims to reveal shared meanings of four well-used timbre attributes: bright, warm, round, and rough. We conducted two complementary studies with French sound and music experts (e.g., composers, sound engineers, sound designers, musicians, etc.). First, we led interviews to gather definitions and instrumental sound examples for the four attributes (N = 32). Second, using an online survey, we tested the relevance and consensus on multiple descriptions most frequently evoked during the interviews (N = 51). The analysis of the rich corpus of verbalizations from the interviews yielded the main description strategies used by the experts, namely acoustic, metaphorical, and source-related. We also derived definitions for the attributes based on significantly relevant and consensual descriptions according to the survey results. Importantly, the definitions rely heavily on metaphorical descriptions. In sum, this study presents an overview of the shared meaning and perception of four metaphorical timbre attributes in the French language.

Attention allows a listener to select the relevant information of the environment and to ignore others. But irrelevant stimuli sometimes manage to capture it and stand out from a scene because of bottom-up processes driven by salient stimuli. This attentional capture effect was observed using an implicit approach based on the additional singleton paradigm. In the auditory domain, it was shown that attributes of sounds such as intensity and frequency tend to capture attention during auditory search (cost to performance) for targets defined on a different dimension such as duration. In the present study, the authors examine whether a similar phenomenon occurs for attributes of timbre such as brightness (related to the spectral centroid) and roughness (related the amplitude modulation depth). More specifically, the relationship between the variations of these attributes and the magnitude of the attentional capture effect was revealed. In experiment 1, the occurrence of a brighter sound (higher spectral centroid) embedded in sequences of successive tones produced significant search costs. In experiments 2 and 3, different values of brightness on one hand, and different values of roughness on the other hand confirmed that attention capture is monotonically driven by the sound features. In experiment 4, the effect was found to be symmetrical; the same positive or negative difference in brightness produced the same cost to performance. Experiment 5 revealed the non-additivity of the effect produced by variations of the two attributes. This work provides a methodology for quantifying the bottom-up component of attention and brings new insights on attention capture and auditory salience.

Communication between sound and music experts is based on the shared understanding of a metaphorical vocabulary derived from other sensory modalities. Yet, the impact of sound expertise on the mental representation of these sound concepts remains blurry. To address this issue, we investigated the acoustic portraits of four metaphorical sound concepts (brightness, warmth, roundness, and roughness) in three groups of participants (sound engineers, conductors, and non-experts). Participants (N = 24) rated a corpus of orchestral instrument sounds (N = 520) using Best–Worst Scaling. With this data-driven method, we sorted the sound corpus for each concept and population. We compared the population ratings and ran machine learning algorithms to unveil the acoustic portraits of each concept. Overall, the results revealed that sound engineers were the most consistent. We found that roughness is widely shared while brightness is expertise dependent. The frequent use of brightness by expert populations suggests that its meaning got specified through sound expertise. As for roundness and warmth, it seems that the importance of pitch and noise in their acoustic definition is the key to distinguishing them. These results provide crucial information on the mental representations of a metaphorical vocabulary of sound and whether it is shared or refined by sound expertise.

Music or sound professionals use specific terminology to communicate about timbre. Some key terms do not come from the sound domain and do not have a clear definition due to their metaphorical nature. This work aims to reveal the shared meaning and to clarify the definition of four well-used timbre attributes: bright, warm, round, and rough. We conducted two complementary studies with French sound and music experts (e.g. composers, sound engineers, sound designers, musicians, etc.). First, we led interviews to gather definitions and instrumental sound examples for the four attributes (N=32). Second, using an online survey, we tested the relevance and consensus on multiple descriptions most frequently evoked during the interviews (N=51). The analysis of the rich corpus of verbalizations from the interviews yielded the main description strategies used by the experts, namely acoustic, metaphorical, and source-related. We also derived definitions for the attributes based on significantly relevant and consensual descriptions according to the survey results. Importantly, the definitions rely heavily on metaphorical descriptions. In sum, this study presents an overview of the shared meaning and perception of four metaphorical timbre attributes in the French language.

A multi-disciplinary team recently came together online to discuss the application of sonification in astronomy, focussing on the effective use of sound for scientific discovery and for improving accessibility to astronomy research and education. Here we provide a meeting report., Comment: Published in Nature Astronomy. A Word document version (more accessible with screen readers) is available under 'ancillary files'. This is the author's own version of the article (it is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections). The Version of Record is available with doi:10.1038/s41550-021-01582-y

The integration of users' perception in the design process is and important challenge for the optimization of products. This study describes how design recommendations can be drawn, from a perceptual experiment with a panel of subjects using a multi-objective interactive genetic algorithm (IGA). The application concerns the bi-objective optimization of the unpleasantness and the detectability of sounds for electric vehicles (EV). After a description of the experimental protocol for the assessment of the detectability and the unpleasantness of EV sounds (listening test), a set of optimal sounds (Pareto efficient) is defined with an IGA experiment. The analysis of these sounds, based on a probabilistic analysis of the selection process, leads to the definition of design recommendations. A second listening test, involving recommended sounds but also other design proposals, allows an evaluation of the validity of the approach. Results show that the sounds recommended obtain interesting performance, in particular to improve the detectability of EV sounds.

This paper presents our ongoing efforts to determine if there are shared references, i.e. mental models, across designers and potential users of sonic icons in mobile applications. First, 13 sound designer students had to conceive sonic icons regarding 11 common mobile functionalities. Their conceptual models were analyzed through lexical analyses of their self-report on their design and manual annotations of their renderings. Second, the 143 obtained icons were evaluated by 52 naïve listeners through a free categorization task. While deeper analyses are still required, results already indicate that some function/sonic icon links make strong consensus on how they should be realized, considering both the designers’ productions and the listeners’ clustering. This forms one key result of the study and could lead to useful guidelines in sonic icon design.

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This paper introduces a new experimental protocol for studying mental representations of urban soundscapes through a simulation process. Subjects are asked to create a full soundscape by means of a dedicated software tool, coupled with a structured sound data set. This paradigm is used to characterize urban sound environment representations by analyzing the sound classes that were used to simulate the auditory scenes. A rating experiment of the soundscape pleasantness using a seven-point bipolar semantic scale is conducted to further refine the analysis of the simulated urban acoustic scenes. Results show that (1) a semantic characterization in terms of presence/absence of sound sources is an effective way to characterize urban soundscape pleasantness, and (2) acoustic pressure levels computed for specific sound sources better characterize the appraisal than the acoustic pressure level computed over the overall soundscape.

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Dans le cadre d’une recherche appliquee en design sonore, un objet industriel naissant – ou renaissant – apparait comme un cas d’etude particulierement emblematique et un terrain d’experimentation inedit : le vehicule electrique. En effet, en tant qu’objet silencieux et mobile – et malgre quelques avis divergents qu’oppose une legislation en cours –, cet artefact pose des problematiques propres a une experience-utilisateur specifique : danger potentiel pour les sujets vulnerables (pietons, cyclistes), degradation de l’ergonomie de conduite ou modification du paysage sonore, notamment urbain. En cela, il questionne certains enjeux majeurs du design sonore – herites du cadre plus general du design : pertinence (un son controle pour un objet naturellement silencieux), innovation (un son controle pour un objet radicalement nouveau), integration (un son controle pour un environnement necessairement maitrise).

International audience; The paper presents a specific sound design process implemented upon a collaboration with an important stakeholder of the wine (Champagne) industry. The goal of the project was to link sound properties with oenological dimensions in order to compose a sonic environment able to realise a multisensory experience during the wine tasting protocol. This creation has resulted from a large scale methodological approach based on the semantic transformation concept (from wine words to sound words) and deployed by means of a codesign method-after having shared respective skills of each field (sound and oenology). A precise description of the workflow is detailed in the paper, The outcomes of the work are presented, either in terms of realisation or conceptual knowledge acquisition. Then, future perspectives for the following of the work are sketched, especially regarding the notion of evaluation. The whole approach is finally put in the broad conceptual framework of 'sciences of sound design' that is developed and argued in the light of this study.

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International audience; An ongoing international arts-research-industry collaborative project focusing on the design and implementation of innovative car alarm systems, alarm/will/sound has a firm theoretical basis in theories of sound perception and classification of Pierre Schaeffer and the acousmatic tradition. In turn, the timbre perception, modelling and design components of this project have had a significant influence on a range of fixed media, electroacoustic and media installation works realised in parallel to the experimental research. An examination of the multiple points of contact and cross-influence between auditory warning research and artistic practice forms the backbone of this article, with an eye towards continued development in both the research and the artistic domains of the project.

International audience; This work is part of as tudy dealing with city-dwellers' quality of life. Noise is known to be an important factor influencing the quality of life. In order to diagnose it properly,w ep ropose an oise monitoring system of urban areas. It is based on the use of large microphone arrays in order to extract the radiated sound field from each passing-by vehicle in typical urban scenes. Amachine learning algorithm is trained so as to classify these extracted signals in clusters combining both the vehicle type and the driving conditions. This system makes it possible to monitor the evolution of the noise levels for each cluster.T he proposed system wasfi rst tested on passing-by isolated vehicles measurements and then implemented in areal street in Paris (France).

International audience; In this paper, we study the relevance of a semantic organization of sounds to ease the browsing of a sound database. For such a task, semantic access to data is traditionally implemented by a keyword selection process. However, various limitations of written language, such as word polysemy, ambiguities, or translation issues, may bias the browsing process. We present and study the efficiency of two sound presentation strategies that organize sounds spatially so as to reflect an underlying semantic hierarchy. For the sake of comparison, we also consider a display whose spatial organization is based on acoustic cues. Those three displays are evaluated in terms of search speed in a crowdsourcing experiment. Results demonstrate the usefulness of using an implicit semantic organization to display sounds, both in terms of search speed and of efficiency of learning. Audio content management and display, Semantic sound data mining 0 Introduction With the growing capability of recording and storage devices, the problem of indexing large databases of audio has recently been the object of much attention [17]. Most of that effort is dedicated to the automatic inference of indexing metadata from the actual audio recording [18, 16]; in contrast, the ability to browse such databases in an effective manner has been less considered. Most media assets management are based on keyword-driven queries. The user enters a word which best characterizes the desired item, and the interface presents him with items related to this word. The effectiveness of this principle is primarily based on the typological structure and nomenclature of the database. However, for databases and more specifically for databases of sounds, several issues arise: 1. Sounds, as many others things, can be described in many ways. Sound may be designated by their sources (a car door), as well as by the action of those sources (the slamming of a car door) or their environments (slamming a car door in a garage) [7, 10, 2]. Designing an effective keyword-based search system requires an accurate description of each sound, which has to be tunable to the sound representation of each user. 2. Pre-defined verbal descriptions of the sounds made available to the users may potentially bias their browsing and final selection. 3. Localization of the query interface is made difficult as the translation of some words referring to qualitative aspects of the sound, such as its ambience, is notoriously ambiguous and subject to cultural specificities. 4. Unless considerable time and resources are invested into developing a multilingual interface, any system based on verbal descriptions can only be used with reduced performance by non-native speakers of the chosen language.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate how the perceptual organization of a multi-tone mixture interacts with global and partial loudness judgments. Grouping (single-object) and segregating (two-object) conditions were created using frequency modulation by applying the same or different modulation frequencies to the odd- and even-rank harmonics. While in Experiment 1 (Exp. 1) the two objects had the same loudness, in Experiment 2 (Exp. 2), loudness level differences (LLD) were introduced (LLD = 6, 12, 18, or 24 phons). In the two-object condition, the loudness of each object was not affected by the mixture when LLD = 0 (Exp. 1), otherwise (Exp. 2), the loudness of the softest object was modulated by LLD, and the loudness of the loudest object was the same regardless of whether it was presented in or out of the mixture. In the single- and the two-object conditions, the global loudness of the mixture was close to the loudness of the loudest object. Taken together, these results suggest that while partial loudness judgments are dependent on the perceptual organization of the scene, global loudness is not. Yet, both partial and global loudness computations are governed by relative "saliences" between different auditory objects (in the segregating condition) or within a single object (in the grouping condition).

International audience; In-car infotainment systems (ICIS) often degrade driving performances since they divert the driver's gaze from the driving scene. Sonification of hierarchical menus (such as those found in most ICIS) is examined in this paper as one possible solution to reduce gaze movements towards the visual display. In a dual-task experiment in the laboratory, 46 participants were requested to prioritize a primary task (a continuous target detection task) and to simultaneously navigate in a realistic mock-up of an ICIS, either sonified or not. Results indicated that sonification significantly increased the time spent looking at the primary task, and significantly decreased the number and the duration of gaze saccades towards the ICIS. In other words, the sonified ICIS could be used nearly exclusively by ear. On the other hand, the reaction times in the primary task were increased in both silent and sonified conditions. This study suggests that sonification of secondary tasks while driving could improve the driver's visual attention of the driving scene.

International audience; The increasing levels of stress entailed by contemporary urban lifestyles can lead to a greater desire to escape from cities. The restorative sense of ‘being away’ produced by natural environments has been substantially explored in greenspaces but little studied in zoos, which endeavour to immerse visitors in a local or exotic environment through both the visual environment and soundscape. We explore how soundscapes contribute to this sense of immersion through self-reflective interviews with 20 participants in two zoos in Paris (France). The zoo was perceived as a natural or a socially crowded area depending on the auditory context. Interestingly, focusing on the captive exotic animals seemed to make participants more aware of the more common birds around them in the zoo. By highlighting both, zoos could potentially increase awareness and care for urban biodiversity.

International audience; Sounds involving liquid sources are part of everyday life. They form a category of sounds easily identified by human listeners in different experimental studies. Unlike acoustic models that focus on bubble vibrations, real life instances of liquid sounds, such as sounds produced by liquids with or without other materials, are very diverse and include water drop sounds, noisy flows, and even solid vibrations. The process that allows listeners to group these different sounds in the same category remains unclear. This article presents a perceptual experiment based on a sorting task of liquid sounds from a household environment. It seeks to reveal the cognitive subcategories of this set of sounds. The clarification of this perceptive process led to the observation of similarities between the perception of liquid sounds and other categories of environmental sounds. Furthermore, the results provide a taxonomy of liquid sounds on which an acoustic analysis was performed that highlights the acoustical properties of the categories, including different rates of air bubble vibration.

Up to now, different studies dealing with vibrations’ influence on acoustics have been, in most cases, realized on global annoyance. In our case, the present study examines the vibrations’ influence on the auditory perception of Diesel character (called Dieselness in this article) of a vehicle. In addition, cultural experience is evaluated by testing two groups of Diesel owners from two European countries (respectively France and Germany). During the experiment, each population was exposed to sound only, and sound and vibrations simultaneously. This perceptual test was realized on a vibration bench (driver seat and steering wheel) with headphones. Three kinds of vehicules and six different driving situations have been tested. Results reveal no differences between French and German. Nevertheless, the adding of vibrations influences the Dieselness evaluation. The participants give slightly higher scores (more Diesel) or equal (as Diesel) with vibrations than without. However, this vibration effect is slightly dependent on the type of vehicles and on the driving situations and it appears less important for German people. In addition, for each group of participants, the other factors vehicle and driving situation have an effect on Dieselness assessment. The effect of vehicle allows to show that 3 cylinders car is significantly different from 4 cylinders and 6 cylinders cars. Finally, the interaction between driving situation and vehicle shows the strongest effect on Dieselness evaluation, among all interactions tested. The vehicle effect is dependent on the driving situation. All results and conclusions have to be taken with care in order not to generalize for all similar classification cars.

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: human vocal imitations, and computational auditory sketches (created by algorithmic computations), both based on easily identifiable sounds (sounds of human actions and manufactured products). The results show that performance with the best vocal imitations was similar to the best auditory sketches for most categories of sounds.More detailed analyses showed that the acoustic distance between vocal imitations and referent sounds is not sufficient to account for such performance. They suggested that instead of reproducing the acoustic properties of the referent sound as accurately as vocally possible, vocal imitations focus on a few important features dependent on each particular sound category.

International audience; The present chapter will examine the interaction between information needs and musical creativity in light of a case study concerning auditory warnings. As the object of study (auditory warnings or more specifically, audible alarms) is basically outside the scope of a stricto sensu musical field, this chapter will give a broader regard towards the role of information within a sound creation practice – sound designthat will, in the present case, aim at developing new car alarm sonic vocabularies and interactive systems, thereby extending in a substantial way the current, conventional, and rather limited domain of the alarm. At the same time, this chapter will present the underlying collaborative model between a scientist and an artist and will detail how their mutual know-how and knowledge converge towards a relevant and innovativeor even unprecedentedproject with research, artistic, and industrial implications.