Distinguishing between straight and curved sounds: Auditory shape in pitch, loudness, and tempo gestures.

Sound-based trajectories or sound gestures draw links to spatiokinetic processes. For instance, a gliding, decreasing pitch conveys an analogous downward motion or fall. Whereas the gesture's pitch orientation and range convey its meaning and magnitude, respectively, the way in which pitch changes over time can be conceived of as gesture shape, which to date has rarely been studied in isolation.

Hearing triangles: Perceptual clarity, opacity, and symmetry of spectrotemporal sound shapes.

In electroacoustic music, the spectromorphological approach commonly employs analogies to non-sonic phenomena like shapes, gestures, or textures. In acoustical terms, sound shapes can concern simple geometries on the spectrotemporal plane, for instance, a triangle that widens in frequency over time. To test the auditory relevance of such triangular sound shapes, two psychoacoustic experiments assessed if and how these shapes are perceived.