From: Rick (ricknance@gmail.com)
Date: Thu May 20 2010 - 09:49:43 EDT
Some aspects of this were being discussed last night in a ProTools
seminar here in regards to one of their soft-synths and samplers for
commercial work.
r
On 5/20/10, Kevin Austin <kevin.austin@videotron.ca> wrote:
>
> The thread is about the perception of environmental sounds. Strong
> resonances to the philosophy of acousmatic music.
>
> Kevin
>
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Guillaume Lemaitre <guillaum@ANDREW.CMU.EDU>
>> Date: 2010 May 19 12:02:11 PM EDT
>> To: AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA
>> Subject: Re: [AUDITORY] sex differences in perception of environmental
>> sounds
>> Reply-To: Guillaume Lemaitre <guillaum@ANDREW.CMU.EDU>
>>
>> Dear Milena and all,
>> The variety of factors at play in environmental sound perception is indeed
>> puzzling and fascinating, and I wish we could investigate more these
>> questions.
>>
>> Milena Droumeva wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Further - is any difference being made in the definition of environmental
>>> sounds between human, mechanical, electronic, electroacoustic and digital
>>> sound?
>
>> To pursue the discussion, Milena's remark has reminded me of some results
>> we had in a applied study [1]. We were looking at how users emotionally
>> react to the manipulation of sonically interactive interfaces. We wanted
>> to highlight systematic relationships between acoustical features and
>> certain patterns in the users' reported feelings, but it turned out that
>> one of the main factor influencing the valence of the reported feelings
>> (in short, how pleasant they found the sounds) was the "naturalness" of
>> the sounds.
>
>> This factor was operationally defined as follows: "natural sounds" were
>> recordings of mechanical events consistent with the interface users were
>> manipulating (objects dropped on a surface), and "synthetic" sounds were
>> created by additive/subtractive synthesis with the specific purpose of
>> sounding artificial (I agree that this definition is rather tautological).
>> Both types of sounds shared the same low-level psychoacoustical features
>> (attack-time, sharpness, tonality).
>
>> In another study, Patrick Susini [2] also found that the "naturalness"
>> (this was defined in a slightly different way) of the sonic feedback of a
>> mATM interface affected how usable users perceived the interface. I have
>> not further dug into this question, but my feeling is that the way
>> listeners process sounds is different when the mechanical cause of a sound
>> is understable (and here I tend to believe that "understable" is strongly
>> related to "how can I physically make that sound"), and when no mechanical
>> cause can be attributed to a sound (as this is the case with certain
>> synthetic sounds).
>
>> But the question might also not be that simple, because, to me, a
>> recording is like a picture: it is not a the reality, and listeners are
>> not fooled by it. Especially in an experiment with recordings of natural
>> sounds, listeners know that they are listening to recordings, that these
>> recordings are technical representations of something, and "act as if"
>> they were presented with the reality. And in the absence of any other
>> visual or contextual information, some recordings of naturally occurring
>> events can become really puzzling, a fact well known by Foley artists.
>
>> So the distinction may not be between "natural" and "synthetic" sounds,
>> but related to the fact that certain sounds may activate perceptual-motor
>> representations (say: they activate the motor representations required to
>> make the actions that make the sounds), and certain may not. This might
>> not only be related to the sounds, but also to the listener's experience,
>> and to contextual factors.
>
>> I wonder is someone has ever studied these questions or could point me
>> toward related studies.
>>
>> Guillaume
>>
>> [1]
>> author = {Guillaume Lemaitre and Olivier Houix and Karmen
>> Franinovi\'c and Yon Visell and Patrick Susini },
>> title = {The {F}lops glass: a device to study emotional reactions
>> arising from sonic interactions},
>> booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing (SMC)
>> Conference},
>> year = {2009},
>> address = {Porto, Portugal},
>> month = {}
>>
>> [2]
>> author = {Patrick Susini and Nicolas Misdariis and Olivier Houix and
>> Guillaume Lemaitre },
>> title = {Does a ``natural" feedback affect perceived usability and
>> emotion in the context of use of an {ATM}?},
>> booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing (SMC)
>> Conference},
>> year = {2009},
>> address = {Porto, Portugal},
>> month = {}
>>
>> --
>> Guillaume Lemaitre
>> Post-doctoral Research Associate
>>
>> Carnegie Mellon University
>> Department of Psychology - Auditory Lab
>> 5000 Forbes Avenue
>> Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
>> tel: +1 412-268-4193
>
>
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dr. Richard Nance Birmingham Southern College Department of Music Metropolitan Youth Orchestras <MyOrch.org> PlasticMusic.Net
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