Auditory smiles trigger unconscious facial imitation

Smiles, produced by the bilateral contraction of the zygomatic major muscles, are one of the most powerful expressions of positive affect and affiliation and also one of the earliest to develop [1]. The perception-action loop responsible for the fast and spontaneous imitation of a smile is considered a core component of social cognition [2]. In humans, social interaction is overwhelmingly vocal, and the visual cues of a smiling face co-occur with audible articulatory changes on the speaking voice [3]. Yet remarkably little is known about how such 'auditory smiles' are processed and reacted to. We have developed a voice transformation technique that selectively simulates the spectral signature of phonation with stretched lips and report here how we have used this technique to study facial reactions to smiled and non-smiled spoken sentences, finding that listeners' zygomatic muscles tracked auditory smile gestures even when they did not consciously detect them

The bag-of-frames approach: a not so sufficient model for urban soundscapes

The "bag-of-frames" approach (BOF), which encodes audio signals as the long-term statistical distribution of short-term spectral features, is commonly regarded as an effective and sufficient way to represent environmental sound recordings (soundscapes) since its introduction in an influential 2007 article. The present paper describes a concep-tual replication of this seminal article using several new soundscape datasets, with results strongly questioning the adequacy of the BOF approach for the task. We show that the good accuracy originally re-ported with BOF likely result from a particularly thankful dataset with low within-class variability, and that for more realistic datasets, BOF in fact does not perform significantly better than a mere one-point av-erage of the signal's features. Soundscape modeling, therefore, may not be the closed case it was once thought to be. Progress, we ar-gue, could lie in reconsidering the problem of considering individual acoustical events within each soundscape

Cracking the social code of speech prosody using reverse correlation

Human listeners excel at forming high-level social representations about each other, even from the briefest of utterances. In particular, pitch is widely recognized as the auditory dimension that conveys most of the information about a speaker's traits, emotional states, and attitudes. While past research has primarily looked at the influence of mean pitch, almost nothing is known about how intonation patterns, i.e., finely tuned pitch trajectories around the mean, may determine social judgments in speech. Here, we introduce an experimental paradigm that combines state-of-the-art voice transformation algorithms with psychophysical reverse correlation and show that two of the most important dimensions of social judgments, a speaker's perceived dominance and trustworthiness, are driven by robust and distinguishing pitch trajectories in short utterances like the word "Hello," which remained remarkably stable whether male or female listeners judged male or female speakers. These findings reveal a unique communicative adaptation that enables listeners to infer social traits regardless of speakers' physical characteristics, such as sex and mean pitch. By characterizing how any given individual's mental representations may differ from this generic code, the method introduced here opens avenues to explore dysprosody and social-cognitive deficits in disorders like autism spectrum and schizophrenia. In addition, once derived experimentally, these prototypes can be applied to novel utterances, thus providing a principled way to modulate personality impressions in arbitrary speech signals

Emotions, intentions and their expressions : Anscombe on Wittgenstein's stalking cat

In this paper, I explore the difference between expression of intention and expression of emotion through a discussion of a passage from G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention, where she claims that expression of intention, unlike expression of emotion, is "purely conventional". I argue that this claim is grounded on the fact that, although emotions can be described, expressions of emotion are not descriptions at all (e.g. of some present feeling or experience). Similarly, expressions of intention are not descriptions of a present state of mind but are rather the expression of a special sort of foreknowledge of a purported action. They are, in this respect, distinct from expression of emotion, since they are a description of some future happening (the purported action). Now, the centrally descriptive character of expressions of intention is what makes them "purely conventional". But of course, Anscombe argues, one can have an intention without expressing it. And having an intention does not amount to having some description in mind.En aquest article exploro la diferència entre l'expressió d'intenció i l'expressió d'emoció a través de la discussió d'un passatge d'Intenció de G. E. M. Anscombe, on afirma que l'expressió d'intenció, a diferència de l'expressió d'emoció, és «purament convencional». Sostinc que aquesta afirmació es basa en el fet que, malgrat que les emocions poden descriure's, les expressions d'emoció no són descripcions de cap mena (per exemple, d'algun sentiment o experiència present). Així mateix, les expressions d'intenció no són descripcions d'un estat mental present, sinó que són l'expressió d'un tipus especial de coneixement previ d'una suposada acció. En aquest sentit, es diferencien de l'expressió de l'emoció, ja que són una descripció d'un esdeveniment futur (la suposada acció). Ara bé, el caràcter centralment descriptiu de les expressions d'intenció és el que les fa «purament convencionals ». Però, per descomptat, sosté Anscombe, es pot tenir una intenció sense expressar-la. I tenir una intenció no equival a tenir una descripció al pensament.En este artículo exploro la diferencia entre la expresión de intención y la expresión de emoción a través de la discusión de un pasaje de Intención de G. E. M. Anscombe, donde afirma que la expresión de intención, a diferencia de la expresión de emoción, es «puramente convencional». Sostengo que esta afirmación se basa en el hecho de que, aunque las emociones pueden describirse, las expresiones de emoción no son descripciones de ningún tipo (por ejemplo, de algún sentimiento o experiencia presente). Asimismo, las expresiones de intención no son descripciones de un estado mental presente, sino que son la expresión de un tipo especial de conocimiento previo de una supuesta acción. En este sentido, se diferencian de la expresión de la emoción, ya que son una descripción de un acontecimiento futuro (la supuesta acción). Ahora bien, el carácter centralmente descriptivo de las expresiones de intención es lo que las hace «puramente convencionales». Pero, por supuesto, sostiene Anscombe, se puede tener una intención sin expresarla. Y tener una intención no equivale a tener una descripción en mente

Gilding for Matter Decoration and Sublimation. A Brief History of the Artisanal Technical Know-how

IJCS it is an open access journal. All content is freely available without charge to any user or his/her institutionInternational audienceThe process used to decorate art objects with thinner and thinner gold coatings varied during centuries. Foil or leaf metal gilding technology was complemented around the beginning of the Christian era by mercury gilding. Simultaneously was developed in some geographic areas the surface depletion process for gilded copper/silver alloys. This paper is motivated by the recent publication by the authors of a didactic opus devoted to the description and the discussion of the technical history of the various gilding procedures, based on the study by modern investigation techniques of a number of gilded museum objects. Through examples from laboratory studies on museum objects, the main evolution steps of gold application are described. A recent mechanical modelling work about gold leaf forming by beating is reported. The different coating processes are discussed, depending on the substrate nature and surface treatment before gilding. It includes high temperature firing for mercury gilding, or powder gilding, e.g. on Middle-Age Syria glass. The paper ends with a listing of the research perspectives open for the presently poorly developed study of the adhesion mechanisms between gold leaf and its substrate. It discusses the important issue of gold-metal interdiffusion during metal gilding processes involving a high temperature step

Materials Surface Science Applied to the Investigation of Cultural Heritage Artefacts

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/International audienceThe skill of ancient artisans manufacturing artistic or everyday artworks surprises the modern material scientists. We show, through the study of archaeological pieces, how laboratory research instruments use enlightens the fabrication processes of unique items at antic periods. The specificity of surface science research favouring non-invasive means for investigations on museum objects is emphasised. The examples concern: Nanostructured layers on ceramic surface to obtain the so-called lustre effect, invented by ancient Islam potters; Intentional coloration of metallic objects by chemical patination, attested in Egypt on 2nd millenary BC and still applied by Japanese artisans; The history of gilding objects: leaf gilding, mercury gilding, and other processes; The Fresco technique, a perennial wall painting, known by ancient Roman and propagated through centuries. The examples open new fields belonging to the modern materials science, to understand the mechanism involved in processes with the constraint that one does not know all the fabrication steps

One hundred ways to process time, frequency, rate and scale in the central auditory system: a pattern-recognition meta-analysis

International audienceThe mammalian auditory system extracts features from the acoustic environment based on the responses of spatially distributed sets of neurons in the subcortical and cortical auditory structures. The characteristic responses of these neurons (linearly approximated by their spectro-temporal receptive fields, or STRFs) suggest that auditory representations are formed, as early as in the inferior colliculi, on the basis of a time, frequency, rate (temporal modulations) and scale (spectral modulations) analysis of sound. However, how these four dimensions are integrated and processed in subsequent neural networks remains unclear. In this work, we present a new methodology to generate computational insights into the functional organization of such processes. We first propose a systematic framework to explore more than a hundred different computational strategies proposed in the literature to process the output of a generic STRF model. We then evaluate these strategies on their ability to compute perceptual distances between pairs of environmental sounds. Finally, we conduct a meta-analysis of the dataset of all these algorithms' accuracies to examine whether certain combinations of dimensions and certain ways to treat such dimensions are, on the whole, more computationally effective than others. We present an application of this methodology to a dataset of ten environmental sound categories, in which the analysis reveals that (1) models are most effective when they organize STRF data into frequency groupings—which is consistent with the known tonotopic organization of receptive fields in auditory structures-, and that (2) models that treat STRF data as time series are no more effective than models that rely only on summary statistics along time—which corroborates recent experimental evidence on texture discrimination by summary statistics

Content Management for the Live Music Industry in Virtual Worlds: Challenges and Opportunities

International audienceThe real-world music industry is undergoing a transition away from the retailing and distribution of fixed objects (records, files) to the consumption of live,interactive events (concerts, happenings). This development is paralleled with the recent flourishing of live music in virtual worlds, which in many ways could become the epitome of its real-world counterpart: for the artists, virtual concerts are cheap and easy to organize, and can therefore be a viable alternative to performing in the real world; for the music promoter and marketer, virtual concert attendance can be traced and analyzed more easily than in the real world; for the virtual concertgoer, attending concerts that are happening a (virtual) world away is possible with a single click. Taking insights from both a survey among the Second-Life music practitioners and from our own prototype of a live music recommendation system built on top of Second-Life, this article shows that the technical infrastructure of current virtual worlds is not well-suited to the development of the content management tools needed to support this opportunity. We propose several new ways to address these problems, and advocate for their recognition both by the artistic and the technical community

Uncovering mental representations of smiled speech using reverse correlation

International audienc