Assessing Sound Perception Through Vocal Imitations of Sounds that Evoke Movements and Materials

Abstract

In this paper we studied a new approach to investigate sound perception. Assuming that a sound contains specific morphologies that convey perceptually relevant information responsible for its recognition, called invariants, we explored the possibility of a new method to determine such invariants, using vocal imitation. We conducted an experiment asking participants to imitate sounds evoking movements and materials generated through a sound synthesizer. Given that the sounds produced by the synthesizer were based on invariant structures, we aimed at retrieving this information from the imitations. Results showed that the participants were able to correctly imitate the dynamics of the sounds, i.e. the action-related information evoked by the sound, whereas texture-related information evoking the material of the sound source was less easily imitated.