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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.

Previous work investigating how non-musicians and expert musicians process local (musical intervals) and global information (melodic contour) in a local-global task (LGT) shed light on a processing style developed by expert musicians that prioritizes local compared to global temporal information (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-72423-7). The goal of the present work was to further address the mechanisms underlying this perceptual reorganization, in particular how it relates to auditory streaming capacities. To this end, we here considered listeners spanning a wider range of musical expertise: in addition to non-musicians (N=10) and expert musicians (N=8), a group of amateur musicians was recruited (N=8), represented by individuals with occasional solo instrumental practice but no prior theoretical training. All participants performed the LGT, as well as an interleaved melody recognition task (IMRT) taken from previous works on auditory streaming that requires the parsing of information along the frequency dimension. In the LGT, results supported previous evidence of a global advantage for non-musicians and a local advantage for expert musicians, and revealed a trend towards a local advantage for amateur musicians. In the IMRT, expert musicians outperformed both non-musicians and amateur musicians, who both had comparable poorer performance. A working memory test and a questionnaire surveying the level of musical expertise of the participants were also conducted. Taken together, our results suggest that, on the one hand, amateur musicians develop a trend to favor local compared to global information, similar to expert musicians, which is associated with their development of working memory; on the other hand, their performance for segregating a target melodic stream from another stream along the frequency dimension remains as poor as that of non-musicians. Overall, our data suggest that the perceptual reorganization of auditory information associated with musical learning takes place as a sequential reconfiguration: compared to the early change of processing style observed on the temporal dimension, the development of processing skills specific to the frequency dimension would require a higher degree of auditory expertise, that we suggest could be associated with collective musical practice.

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.

The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local–global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). Our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. Non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local–global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of “analytic” processing acquisition in musicians.

International audience; Influence of loudness on sound recognition was investigated in an explicit memory experiment based on a conscious recollection-test phase-of previously encoded information-study phase. Three encoding conditions were compared: semantic (sounds were sorted in three different categories), sensory (sounds were rated in loudness), and control (participants were solely asked to listen to the sounds). Results revealed a significant study-to-test change effect: loudness change between the study and the test phases affects recognition. The effect was not specific to the encoding condition (semantic vs sensory) suggesting that loudness is an important hint for everyday sounds recognition. [Q-JF] Date

When designing sound evaluation experiments, researchers rely on listening test methods, such as rating scales (RS). In this work, we investigated the suitability of best-worst scaling (BWS) — a relative judgment method — for the perceptual evaluation of sound qualities. To do so, 20 participants rated the ‘brightness’ of a corpus of instrumental sounds (N=100) with RS and BWS methods. Our results show that BWS is equivalent to RS in terms of performance, participants’ impression, and duration. Interestingly, participants preferred the BWS over RS. Therefore, BWS is an alternative that reliably measure perceptual sound qualities and could be used in many-sounds paradigm.

Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of stimuli. Moreover, the influence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present study compared visual and auditory short-term memory for different types of materials, aiming to understand whether sensory modality and material type can influence short-term memory performance. Furthermore, we aimed to assess if music expertise can modulate memory performance, as previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent, visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians. To do so, we adapted the same recognition paradigm (delayed-matching to sample) across different types of stimuli. In each trial, participants (musicians and non-musicians) were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether the two sequences were identical or different. The performance was compared for auditory and visual materials belonging to three different categories: (1) verbal (i.e., syllables); (2) nonverbal (i.e., that could not be easily denominated) with contour (based on loudness or luminance variations); and (3) nonverbal without contour (pink noise sequences or kanji letters sequences). Contour and no-contour conditions referred to whether the sequence can entail (or not) a contour (i.e., a pattern of up and down changes) based on non-pitch features. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for auditory no-contour stimuli and for contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with specific short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, also extending cross-modally when stimuli have contour information. Moreover, our results suggest a role of encoding strategies (i.e., how the material is represented mentally during the task) for short-term-memory performance.

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.

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.

International audience; Semantic differentials are frequently used to investigate sounds from a subjective point of view. Theapplication of semantic differentials to the case of the rolling sound of office chairs is dealt with in thisstudy. After a preliminary selection of the semantic differentials by fifty-two participants, another ninetyparticipants took part in a listening test and described the acoustic stimuli of two office chairs, of highand low quality, respectively, rolling over polyvinyl chloride (PVC), ceramic and wood floorings, undercontext and laboratory test conditions. Under laboratory condition, recorded real stimuli were presentedto the listeners via headphones, or under SounBe condition. SounBe is a new tool that has recently beenconceived to explore sound at an early design stage. With this method, interactions between a chair andthe floor are simplified, a mechanical sound is produced of a wheel moving across a flooring tile, and therecorded stimuli are then presented to the listeners through headphones. Four 7-point Likert scalesemantic differentials, related to calmness, roughness, pleasantness and annoyance, were used to collectsubjective data. Objective data were instead obtained from psychoacoustic indexes. Factors such as genderand weight were found to have no effect on the subjective and objective data. The flooring factorinstead resulted to have much more influence than the chair factor. No statistically significant differencewas observed between the test conditions on the semantic differential scales, thus proving the compatibilitybetween SounBe and real sounds.

International audience; It has been recently shown that loudness affects the perceptual representation of sounds. Following this idea, the present experiment examines whether recognition of everyday sounds is sensitive to study-to-test changes in sound pressure level. In addition, the experiment tests the hypothesis that the sound pressure level changes could hinder recognition more strongly when an encoding task focuses participants on sensory properties of the sounds (e.g., loudness) during the study phase. The study phase used three encoding tasks: sensory (participants rated loudness), semantic (participants categorized sounds in three categories), and control tasks. The test phase measured recognition scores and response times for a list of targets (sounds presented in the study phase) mixed with distractors, both presented at two different levels (L1: the level of the phase study; L2: 15 dB higher for half of the sounds, and 15 dB lower for the other half). Results reveal a significant effect of the level change on recognition scores; recognition is more accurate for sounds at L1. As predicted, recognition is weaker with the sensory encoding task, though the effect is not significant. Those results suggest that loudness is encoded together with semantic attributes in the memory representations of 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: 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; Designers are used to produce a variety of physical and digital representations at different stages of the design process. These intermediary objects (IOs) do support the externalization of ideas and the mediation with the different stakeholders. In the same manner, sound designers deliver several intermediate sounds to their clients, through iteration and refinement. In fact, these preliminary sounds are sound sketches representing the intermediate steps of an evolving creation. In this paper we reflect on the method of sketching sounds through vocalizations and gestures, and how a technological support, grounded in the understanding of the design practice, can foster transparency and mediation in sound design-thinking. Three tools, under development in the scope of the EU project SkAT-VG (Sketching Audio Technologies using Vocalizations and Gestures) are introduced and discussed, based on the preliminary observations collected during a workshop involving professional sound designers.

International audience; This article reports on an interdisciplinary research project on movement sonification for sensori-motor learning. First, we describe different research fields which have contributed to movement sonification, from music technology including gesture-controlled sound synthesis, sonic interaction design, to research on sensori-motor learning with auditory-feedback. In particular, we propose to distinguish between sound-oriented tasks and movement-oriented tasks in experiments involving interactive sound feedback. We describe several research questions and recently published results on movement control, learning and perception. In particular, we studied the effect of the auditory feedback on movements considering several cases: from experiments on pointing and visuo-motor tracking to more complex tasks where interactive sound feedback can guide movements, or cases of sensory substitution where the auditory feedback can inform on object shapes. We also developed specific methodologies and technologies for designing the sonic feedback and movement sonification. We conclude with a discussion on key future research challenges in sensori-motor learning with movement sonification. We also point out toward promising applications such as rehabilitation, sport training or product design.

International audience; Imitative behaviors are widespread in humans, in particular whenever two persons communicate and interact. Several tokens of spoken languages (onomatopoeias, ideophones, and phonesthemes) also display different degrees of iconicity between the sound of a word and what it refers to. Thus, it probably comes at no surprise that human speakers use a lot of imi-tative vocalizations and gestures when they communicate about sounds, as sounds are notably difficult to describe. What is more surprising is that vocal imitations of non-vocal everyday sounds (e.g. the sound of a car passing by) are in practice very effective: listeners identify sounds better with vocal imitations than with verbal descriptions, despite the fact that vocal imitations are inaccurate reproductions of a sound created by a particular mechanical system (e.g. a car driving by) through a different system (the voice apparatus). The present study investigated the semantic representations evoked by vocal imitations of sounds by experimentally quantifying how well listeners could match sounds to category labels. The experiment used three different types of sounds: recordings of easily identifiable sounds (sounds of human actions and manufactured products), human vocal imitations, and computational " auditory sketches " (created by algorithmic computations). The results show that performance with the best vocal imitations was similar to the best auditory sketches for most categories of sounds, and even to the referent sounds themselves in some cases. More detailed analyses showed that the acoustic distance between a vocal imitation and a referent sound is not sufficient to account for such performance. Analyses suggested that instead of trying to reproduce the referent sound as accurately as vocally possible, vocal imitations focus on a few important features, which depend on each particular sound category. These results offer perspectives for understanding how human listeners store and access long-term sound representations, and sets the stage for the development of human-computer interfaces based on vocalizations.

This paper reports on emotions felt by users manipulating a computationally and acoustically augmented artifact. Prior studies have highlighted systematic relationships between acoustic features and emotions felt when individuals are passively listening to sounds. However, during interaction with real or computationally augmented artifacts, acoustic feedback results from users' active manipulation of the artifact. In such a setting, both sound and manipulation can contribute to the emotions that are elicited. We report on a set of experimental studies that examined the respective roles of sound and manipulation in eliciting emotions from users. The results show that, while the difficulty of the manipulation task predominated, the acoustical qualities of the sounds also influenced the feelings reported by participants. When the sounds were embedded in an interface, their pleasantness primarily influenced the valence of the users' feelings. However, the results also suggested that pleasant sounds made the task slightly easier, and left the users feeling more in control. The results of these studies provide guidelines for the measurement and design of affective aspects of sound in computationally augmented artifacts and interfaces.

This study examined the influence of the naturalness of a sonic feedback on the perceived usability and pleasantness of the sounds used in a human-computer interface. The interface was the keyboard of an Automatic Teller Machine. The naturalness of the feedback was manipulated by using different kinds of relationship between a keystroke and its sonic feedback: causal, iconic, and arbitrary. Users were required to rate the naturalness, usability, and pleasantness of the sounds before and after manipulating the interface. Two kinds of interfaces were used: a normally functioning and a defective interface. The results indicated that the different relationships resulted in different levels of naturalness: causal mappings resulted in sounds perceived as natural, and arbitrary mappings in sounds perceived as non-natural, regardless of whether the sounds were recorded or synthesized. Before the subjects manipulated the interface, they rated the natural sounds as more pleasant and useful than the non-natural sounds. Manipulating the interface exaggerated these judgments for the causal and arbitrary mappings. The feedback sounds ruled by an iconic relationship between the user’s gesture and the resulting sounds were overall positively rated, but were sensitive to a potential contamination by the negative feelings created by a defective interface.

The aim of the study presented here is to examine the effects of instructions on the perception of a sequence of interior car sounds in three different conditions. In each condition, participants listened to the same sound sequence, but the type of information given during the instruction phase, prior to the listening test, were different. In the first condition, a group of participants listens to the sound sequence without any external information except that the sound sequence was recorded inside a car. In the second condition, another group of participants was informed by a text of the successive events that are presented in the sound sequence. In the third condition, participants were informed first by the same text as in condition 2, and then by several pictures showing the different steps that could be heard from the beginning to the end of the sound sequence. Each of the three groups of subjects participated in three tasks: an identification task, a recognition task, and a semantic judgment task using twelve verbal attributes. We assessed how listeners’ judgments of the sound sequence were affected by external information. Results show that the effect is dependant on the type of verbal attribute and on the combination of external information. The verbal information, provided without visual information in condition 2, improves the identification and recognition scores, and thus influences positively the comprehension of the sound sequence and the feeling of immersion. The added visual information, in condition 3, does not change the identification scores, but affects judgements on the pleasantness scale. It appears that the perception of the sound sequence was influenced by visual cues. This study reveals that the format of instructions influences perceptive judgments of the sound sequence tested, but globally factors accounting for the participants’ perception across the three conditions are not modified.

This study of olfaction is particular, by the specificities of this sensorial modality. These particularities result in difficulties and a wide inter individual variability in the description of fragrances. We study the effect of two tasks (sorting and comparison of triplets) followed by verbalizations on the perception of similarities between stimuli, the number of generated characteristics and on the inter individual variability. The stimuli are nine ladies’ fragrances, the participants twenty-eight inexperienced women. The results show that the perception of similarities between perfumes is close, whatever the task may be, but the number of generated characteristics is more important with the sorting task and the inter individual variability more important with the triad task. We discuss the idea that it seems possible to limit the individual variability in odours description, controlling context effects.

International audience; Effect of loudness on the perceptual structure underlying a corpus of sounds is investigated bytwo experimental methods: pairwise comparisons and sorting. Both methods are applied to a corpus of recordingssounds presented with their ecological, non normalized loudness, and to the same corpus equalized in loudness. Twotypes of perceptual structures (multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis) are derived. Domination ofone auditory attribute – loudness – on less salient ones is discussed according to the two types of perceptualstructures. In the non-loudness-normalized corpus, loudness was the main factor explaining participant’s judgmentsfor both tasks. In particular, representations derived from sorting data almost solely reflected sound pressure leveldifference between sounds. On the opposite, loudness normalization allowed the emergence of several predictedauditory attributes that characterize the tested sounds. On that second corpus however, sorting data was found lessappropriate than pairwise data to provide interpretable continuous dimensions.

International audience; In this work, we study how loudness affects the structure of the perceptual representation of sounds with similar timbre. Using psychoacoustics experiments, we compare the perceptual representations of the same sounds presented either with their non-normalized, ecological sound pressure level or normalized in loudness. The corpus of sounds, recordings of the interior of different cars, moving at the same motor speed, and having the same price range, consists of sounds with similar timbre, produced by similar sources, in order to let participants focus on sound properties, rather than source differences. Two types of perceptual structures (multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis) were derived from data obtained with two types of tasks (pairwise comparisons and sorting tasks), and compared. In the non-loudness-normalized corpus, loudness was the main factor explaining participant's judgements for both tasks. Only in the loudness-normalized corpus did auditory attributes emerge that characterize the timbre of interior car sounds. In addition, tasks involving sorting data were found to be less appropriate than pairwise data to provide interpretable continuous dimensions.

The experiments conducted in this research aimed to increase our understanding of olfactory properties and classify them hierarchically through entailment. The research objective was to build an odor classification based on internal knowledge (i.e. mental context). Twelve floral scents were described freely by 60 participants. First, three sensory judges undertook a semantic analysis of the 1145 olfactory terms gathered. Secondly, a study of the entailment between olfactory properties was conducted using 42 subjects working on four lists of terms describing the characteristics of floral perfumes. The results confirmed the hypothesis that olfactory properties show tree-like structure. This allowed us to propose a classification system composed of two superordinate categories: First, objects , being olfactory sources, constitute the first category and are considered as olfactory properties themselves (i.e. civilization , food and natural sources ). Second non-objects properties are those applicable to a diversity of objects: (i.e. properties , such as objects' physical state: sensory, intensity, space, time) and those related to the subject (as personal feelings and value judgments). Based on these results, it appears that olfactory properties can be organized as a semantic network in line with the general theory of categorization.

cote interne IRCAM: Caramiaux14a; National audience; We investigated gesture description of sound stimuli performed during a listening task. Our hypothesis is that the strategies in gestural responses depend on the level of identification of the sound source and specifically on the identification of the action causing the sound. To validate our hypothesis, we conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, we built two corpora of sounds. The first corpus contains sounds with identifiable causal actions. The second contains sounds for which no causal actions could be identified. These corpora properties were validated through a listening test. In the second experiment, participants performed arm and hand gestures synchronously while listening to sounds taken from these corpora. Afterward, we conducted interviews asking participants to verbalize their experience while watching their own video recordings. They were questioned on their perception of the listened sounds and on their gestural strategies. We showed that for the sounds where causal action can be identified, participants mainly mimic the action that has produced the sound. In the other case, when no action can be associated with the sound, participants trace contours related to sound acoustic features. We also found that the interparticipants’ gesture variability is higher for causal sounds compared to noncausal sounds. Variability demonstrates that, in the first case, participants have several ways of producing the same action, whereas in the second case, the sound features tend to make the gesture responses consistent.

International audience; Mutations in late 20th-century sound design have transformed it from an empirical know-how into a full-fledged research field, with applications in the domain of everyday sound perception. This evolution leads us to propose an updated definition and a new description of the sound design process. Our updated definition, namely ‘making intentions audible’, is based on two types of intentions, one, essential, of function, and the other of form. We describe here three types of intentions of function, able to communicate information through an artifact. We then give a new description of the overall sound design process, as a combination of three steps (analysing, creating and testing), which articulate sound perception and sound design. Our first claim here is that the sound design process should be informed by knowledge, research and exploration of everyday sound perception; several industrial examples thereof will be presented. Our second claim is that sound design should be used to inform everyday sound perception research, both by suggesting new informative experiments and raising new methodological issues, ranging from sound design tools to experimental setups that need to be implemented specifically in the framework of sonic interaction design.

The automatic identification of musical instruments is a relatively unexplored and potentially very important field for its promise to free humans from time-consuming searches on the Internet and indexing of audio material. Speaker identification techniques have been used in this paper to determine the properties (features) which are most effective in identifying a statistically significant number of sounds representing four classes of musical instruments (oboe, sax, clarinet, flute) excerpted from actual performances. Features examined include cepstral coefficients, constant-Q coefficients, spectral centroid, autocorrelation coefficients, and moments of the time wave. The number of these coefficients was varied, and in the case of cepstral coefficients, ten coefficients were sufficient for identification. Correct identifications of 79%-84% were obtained with cepstral coefficients, bin-to-bin differences of the constant-Q coefficients, and autocorrelation coefficients; the latter have not been used previously in either speaker or instrument identification work. These results depended on the training sounds chosen and the number of clusters used in the calculation. Comparison to a human perception experiment with sounds produced by the same instruments indicates that, under these conditions, computers do as well as humans in identifying woodwind instruments.

International audience; Participatory workshops have been organized within the framework of the ANR project Legos that concerns gesture-sound interactive systems. These workshops addressed both theoretical issues and experimentation with prototypes. The first goal was to stimulate new ideas related to the control of everyday objects using sound feedback, and then, to create and experiment with new sonic augmented objects. The second aim was educational. We investigated how sonic interaction design can be introduced to people without backgrounds in sound and music. We present in this article an overview of three workshops. The first workshop focused on the analysis and the possible sonification of everyday objects. New usage scenarios were obtained and tested. The second workshop focused on sound metaphor, questioning the relationship between sound and gesture. The last one was a workshop organized during a summer school for students. During these workshops, we experimented a cycle of design process: analysis, creation and testing.

International audience; In this article we report on listener categorization of meaningful environmental sounds. A starting point for this study was the phenomenological taxonomy proposed by Gaver (1993b). In the first experimental study, 15 participants classified 60 environmental sounds and indicated the properties shared by the sounds in each class. In a second experimental study, 30 participants classified and described 56 sounds exclusively made by solid objects. The participants were required to concentrate on the actions causing the sounds independent of the sound source. The classifications were analyzed with a specific hierarchical cluster technique that accounted for possible cross-classifications, and the verbalizations were submitted to statistical lexical analyses. The results of the first study highlighted 4 main categories of sounds: solids, liquids, gases, and machines. The results of the second study indicated a distinction between discrete interactions (e.g., impacts) and continuous interactions (e.g., tearing) and suggested that actions and objects were not independent organizational principles. We propose a general structure of environmental sound categorization based on the sounds' temporal patterning, which has practical implications for the automatic classification of environmental sounds

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National audience; Nous avons mené une première étude sur la classification libre de sons environnementaux. Les résultats de cette étude ont montré que des auditeurs sans expertise sonore ont tendance à regrouper les sons de façon causale. Nous avons trouvé une distinction claire entre les catégories de sons produits par des gaz, des liquides, des solides et par des machines électriques. Ce résultat confirme une classification théorique proposée dans la littérature. Lors d’une deuxième étude présentée ici, nous nous sommes focalisés sur la catégorie des solides produisant une grande variété de sons. Nous avons demandé à des participants sans expertise sonore de faire des groupes de sons en se focalisant sur l’action produisant le son. Les sons sélectionnés avaient été au préalable bien identifiés. Après leur classification, il était demandé au participant de décrire chaque classe produite. Pour analyser les résultats, nous avons utilisé une technique d’analyse par groupements hiérarchiques qui produit deux arbres. Le premier arbre reflète la structure principale, le deuxième quant à lui pouvant montrer une structure secondaire. Le but était de mettre en lumière différents types de similarité utilisés en même temps lors d’une classification par une même personne ou par différentes personnes. Nous avons complété cette analyse par une étude des verbalisations produites. Nous avons effectué deux types d’analyses, une analyse générale avec ALCESTE et une analyse spécifique avec LEXICO pour produire un portrait de chaque classe issue de l’arbre hiérarchique. Nous avons fait cette deuxième analyse pour chacun des deux arbres. Nous présenterons le résultat de cette étude qui montre deux grandes catégories associées dans un cas à des interactions entre objets (discrètes, continues, composées) et dans l’autre cas à une modification de l’objet (déformation, rupture). Nous discuterons aussi de l’apport d’une analyse de classification par groupements hiérarchiques produisant deux structures distinctes.

cote interne IRCAM: Lemaitre09e; None / None; National audience; The influence of listener's expertise and sound identification on the categorization of environmental sounds is reported in three studies. In Study 1, the causal uncertainty of 96 sounds is measured by counting the different causes described by 29 participants. In Study 2, fifteen experts and fifteen non-experts classify a selection of 60 sounds, and indicate the similarities they use. In Study 3, 38 participants indicate their confidence in identifying the sounds. Participants report using either acoustical similarities or similarities of the causes of the sounds. Experts use acoustical similarity more often than non-experts, who use the similarity of the cause of the sounds. Sounds with a low causal uncertainty are more often grouped together because of the similarities of the cause, whereas sounds with a high causal uncertainty are grouped together more often because of the acoustical similarities. The same conclusions are reached for identification confidence. This measure allows the sound classification to be predicted, and is a straightforward method to determine the appropriate description of a sound. {par bf Keywords:} environmental sounds, categorization, similarity, causal uncertainty, identification confidence

This paper reports on an approach to the design of continuous sonic feedback in tangible interfaces, and on quantitative evaluation methods intended to guide such design tasks. The issues it addresses may be of central relevance to areas of the emerging discipline of sonic interaction design that have begun to address the unique problems of designing sound for highly interactive contexts. Three experiments were conducted to assess two key aspects of the sound design developed for an abstract object designed for these experiments, which we refer to as the Spinotron. First, a comparison of sound source identification was made between three cases: passive listening to temporally static sounds; passive listening to dynamically evolving sounds; and listening to sounds generated through active manipulation of the artifact. The results show that control over the sound production process influences the material of the objects in interaction identified as the source of the sounds. Second, in a learning experiment, users' performance with the Spinotron device was compared between a group of participants that were provided only with passive proprioceptive information, and for another group who were also presented with synthetic sound produced by the artifact. The results indicated that the sound, when present, aided users in learning to control the device, whereas without the sound no learning was observed. Together, these results hold promise toward creating a foundation for the design of continuous sound that is intended to accompany control actions on the part of users, and toward establishing a basis for experimental/quantitative evaluation methods and gathering basic knowledge about sensory-motor activity engaged in tangible sonic interactions.

cote interne IRCAM: Lemaitre08c; None / None; National audience; We report an experiment investigating the influence of the expertise of listeners on the strategy used to categorize sounds. A set of sixty kitchen sounds was selected, based on their causal uncertainty (ranging from very well identified to ambiguous). Thirty listeners were selected on the basis of their expertise in sound and music: fifteen "experts" and fifteen "naïves". First, they had to group together the sounds. Second, they had to describe the properties shared by the sounds in each category. Finally, they were provided with a description of different strategies of classification previously identified (acoustical, causal or semantic similarity), and required to indicate, for each category, which one they had used. The results show a strong influence of the expertise of the participants: while naive listeners made categories mainly on the basis of the events that they identified as having caused the sounds, experts made mainly categories of sounds on the basis of the perceived acoustical properties (timbre, time patterns, etc.). This result is coherent with the available literature demonstrating the coexistence of different strategies of listening, and links these strategies to the skills of the listeners. [This work is founded by the FP6 NEST Pathfinder European project CLOSED]

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