A perceptual sound space for auditory displays based on sung-vowel synthesis.

When designing displays for the human senses, perceptual spaces are of great importance to give intuitive access to physical attributes. Similar to how perceptual spaces based on hue, saturation, and lightness were constructed for visual color, research has explored perceptual spaces for sounds of a given timbral family based on timbre, brightness, and pitch. To promote an embodied approach to the design of auditory displays, we introduce the Vowel-Type-Pitch (VTP) space, a cylindrical sound space based on human sung vowels, whose timbres can be synthesized by the composition of acoustic formants and can be categorically labeled.

Path Following in Non-Visual Conditions.

Path-following tasks have been investigated mostly under visual conditions, that is when subjects are able to see both the path and the tool, or limb, used for navigation. Moreover, only basic path shapes are usually adopted. In the present experiment, participants must rely exclusively on continuous, non-speech, and ecological auditory and vibrotactile cues to follow a path on a flat surface.

On the effectiveness of vocal imitations and verbal descriptions of sounds.

Describing unidentified sounds with words is a frustrating task and vocally imitating them is often a convenient way to address the issue. This article reports on a study that compared the effectiveness of vocal imitations and verbalizations to communicate different referent sounds. The stimuli included mechanical and synthesized sounds and were selected on the basis of participants' confidence in identifying the cause of the sounds, ranging from easy-to-identify to unidentifiable sounds.

Might as well jump: sound affects muscle activation in skateboarding.

The aim of the study is to reveal the role of sound in action anticipation and performance, and to test whether the level of precision in action planning and execution is related to the level of sensorimotor skills and experience that listeners possess about a specific action. Individuals ranging from 18 to 75 years of age--some of them without any skills in skateboarding and others experts in this sport--were compared in their ability to anticipate and simulate a skateboarding jump by listening to the sound it produces. Only skaters were able to modulate the forces underfoot and to apply muscle synergies that closely resembled the ones that a skater would use if actually jumping on a skateboard.

Evidence for a spatial bias in the perception of sequences of brief tones.

Listeners are unable to report the physical order of particular sequences of brief tones. This phenomenon of temporal dislocation depends on tone durations and frequencies. The current study empirically shows that it also depends on the spatial location of the tones.

Action expertise reduces brain activity for audiovisual matching actions: an fMRI study with expert drummers.

When we observe someone perform a familiar action, we can usually predict what kind of sound that action will produce. Musical actions are over-experienced by musicians and not by non-musicians, and thus offer a unique way to examine how action expertise affects brain processes when the predictability of the produced sound is manipulated. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan 11 drummers and 11 age- and gender-matched novices who made judgments on point-light drumming movements presented with sound.

Integration of acoustical information in the perception of impacted sound sources: the role of information accuracy and exploitability.

Sound sources are perceived by integrating information from multiple acoustical features. The factors influencing the integration of information are largely unknown. We measured how the perceptual weighting of different features varies with the accuracy of information and with a listener's ability to exploit it.

Multisensory integration of drumming actions: musical expertise affects perceived audiovisual asynchrony.

We investigated the effect of musical expertise on sensitivity to asynchrony for drumming point-light displays, which varied in their physical characteristics (Experiment 1) or in their degree of audiovisual congruency (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, 21 repetitions of three tempos x three accents x nine audiovisual delays were presented to four jazz drummers and four novices. In Experiment 2, ten repetitions of two audiovisual incongruency conditions x nine audiovisual delays were presented to 13 drummers and 13 novices.

Efficiency, accuracy, and stability issues in discrete-time simulations of single reed wind instruments.

A quantitative study of discrete-time simulations for a single reed physical model is presented. It is shown that when the continuous-time model is discretized, a delay-free path is generated in the computation. A general solution is proposed to this problem, that amounts to operating a geometrical transformation on the equations.