Knowledge in Sound Design: The Silent Electric Vehicle—A Relevant Case Study

This article builds on a large industry-driven sound design experiment focusing on the underexplored area of sound signature for silent electric vehicles. On the basis of some retrospective observations, and in the conceptual framework of design research, we propose a post-analysis that leads to provide insights on sound design as a discipline, considering its status, the status of its performers (sound designers), and its specific position between science and arts. The main aim of the article is to contribute to increase the general knowledge on sound design and to study it from the perspective of its principles, practices, and procedures

Synthèse - Reproduction - Perception des Sons Instrumentaux et Environnementaux : Application au Design Sonore

This dissertation presents a composition of studies and research works articulated around three main topics : synthesis, reproduction and perception of sounds, considering both musical and environmental sounds. Moreover, it focuses on an application field, the sound design, that globally involves the conception of intentional everyday sounds. The document is based on a rather uniform structure and contains, for each part, a general presentation of the topic which brings theoretical elements together with an overview of the state-of-the-art, followed by more precise developments in order to focus on the specific matters related to each topic – in detail, modal formalism in sound synthesis by physical modeling, for the "Synthesis" section ; measurement and control of musical instruments directivity, for the "Reproduction" section ; timbre and sound sources identification, for the "Perception" section – and then followed by a detailed presentation of the personal works related to each matter, in some cases, in the form of published papers. Then, these several elements of knowledge and experience offer a personal and original contribution, deliberately put in a broad, multidisciplinary and applied framework.Ce mémoire présente une composition d’études et de travaux de recherche orientés autour de trois grandes thématiques : la synthèse, la reproduction et la perception des sons, en considérant à la fois les sons de nature musicale mais aussi environnementale. Il vise en outre un champ d’application, le design sonore, qui implique globalement la création intentionnelle de sons du quotidien. La structure du document est conçu selon un schéma relativement uniforme et comporte, pour chaque partie, une présentation générale de la thématique apportant des éléments théoriques et des données relatives à l’état de l’art, suivie de développements spécifiques permettant de converger vers les sujets d’étude propres à chaque thème – explicitement, formalisme modal dans la synthèse par modélisation physique, pour la partie "Synthèse" ; mesure et contrôle de la directivité des instruments de musique, pour la partie "Reproduction" ; timbre et identification des sources sonores, pour la partie "Perception"– puis d’une présentation détaillée des travaux personnels relatifs à chacun des sujets, le cas échéant, sous la forme d’un article publié. Ces divers éléments de connaissance et d’expérience propose donc une contribution personnelle et originale, volontairement inscrite dans un cadre de recherche élargi, pluridisciplinaire et appliqué

Designing Sounds Means Designing Relationships

In this article we propose the perspective of relationship as a conceptual approach to the discipline of sound design. Based on literature reviews and case studies, we state that making sound design means designing relationships, even before sounds, and we propose to include this expression in the current definitions of the sound design discipline. Moreover, we observe that sound design practices can be inscribed in more than one relational perspective, thus widening the scope of sound design possibilities. This multi-perspective view of sound as the barycentre of a relationship system becomes a useful analysis and design tool: it allows sound designers to investigate the complex problems of contemporary projects, aiming toward fruitful and unexpected design directions

SimScene : a web-based acoustic scenes simulator

International audienceWe introduce in this paper a soundscape simulator called SimScene, designed to be used as an experimental tool to characterize the mental representation of sound environments. The soundscape simulator allows a subject to generate a full sonic environment by sequencing and mixing sound elements, and manipulating their sound level and time positioning. To make the simulation process effective, SimScene has not be designed to manipulate individual parameters of individ-ual sounds, but to specify high-level parameters for whole classes of sounds, organized into a hierarchical semantically structured dataset. To avoid any linguistic bias, a listening oriented interface allows subjects to explore the dataset with-out any text written help. The entire software is developed in Javascript using the standard Web Audio technology, and is thus fully supported by most modern web browsers. This fact should allow experimenters to adopt a crowdsourcing approach to experimentation in order to assess hypotheses on large populations, and facilitate the development of ex-perimental protocols to investigate the influence of socio-cultural background on soundscape perception

EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION OF A URBAN TRAFFIC NOISE ANNOYANCE MODEL

International audienceThis study deals with noise annoyance in urban environments. It is based on a previous work that resulted in two main outputs. First, a measurement tool that identifies and extracts sonic properties of the main urban noises sources, i.e. the different types of vehicles. Second, a modeling tool that estimates the perceived annoyance level by adapting from the literature, and implementing, a current multi-class psychoacoustic model. The present work follows these outcomes and aims at validating the annoyance estimations given by the model with an experimental approach. A listening test is designed in order to be able to collect perceived annoyance in a virtual environment (in lab test). Sound scenes made of urban soundscapes (background) and vehicles passing-by (foreground) are built and encoded in a 2D-audio immersive format (2D to multichannel algorithm), in order to create a listening experience as ecological as possible. Within this frame, an important experimental protocol is designed in order to measure the perceived annoyance caused by each synthesized sound scene and to control the cognitive load (attention on a list of words to play back afterwards) of the participants. The first rounds of data analysis show consistent results, especially in terms of influence of sound level or source typicality on the measured annoyance. A deeper round of analysis is currently being processed in order to examine the fine correlation between measured and predicted annoyance values, with regards to psychoacoustic features of source signals. All the results will be presented and discussed in the course of the conference

A novel interface for audio based sound data mining

In this paper, the design of a web interface for audio-based sound data mining is studied. The interface allows the user to explore a sound dataset without any written textual hint. Dataset sounds are grouped into semantic classes which are themselves clustered to build a semantic hierarchical struc-ture. Each class is represented by a circle distributed on a two dimensional space according to its semantic level. Sev-eral means of displaying sounds following this template are presented and evaluated with a crowdsourcing experiment

Saliency-based modeling of acoustic scenes using sparse non-negative matrix factorization

International audienceThe modelling of auditory scenes is a challenging task in Computational Auditory Scene Analysis. A method based on sparse Non-negative Matrix Factorization that can be used with no prior knowledge of the audio content to establish the similarity between scenes is proposed. The method is evaluated on a corpus of soundscapes of train stations issued from a perceptual study and results are compared with the human perception. The proposed method, by being able to focus on salient events within the scene, achieves better performances than a state-of-the-art Bag-of-Frames approach though not reaching the human performances

Mapping Sound Properties and Oenological Characters by a Collaborative Sound Design Approach -Towards an Augmented Experience

International audienceThe paper presents a specific sound design process implemented upon a collaboration with an important stakeholder of the wine (Champagne) industry. The goal of the project was to link sound properties with oenological dimensions in order to compose a sonic environment able to realise a multisensory experience during the wine tasting protocol. This creation has resulted from a large scale methodological approach based on the semantic transformation concept (from wine words to sound words) and deployed by means of a codesign method-after having shared respective skills of each field (sound and oenology). A precise description of the workflow is detailed in the paper, The outcomes of the work are presented, either in terms of realisation or conceptual knowledge acquisition. Then, future perspectives for the following of the work are sketched, especially regarding the notion of evaluation. The whole approach is finally put in the broad conceptual framework of 'sciences of sound design' that is developed and argued in the light of this study

Training convolutional neural networks to estimate turbulent sub-grid scale reaction rates

This work presents a new approach for premixed turbulent combustion modeling based on convolutional neural networks (CNN).1 We first propose a framework to reformulate the problem of subgrid flame surface density estimation as a machine learning task. Data needed to train the CNN is produced by direct numerical simulations (DNS) of a premixed turbulent flame stabilized in a slot-burner configuration. A CNN inspired from a U-Net architecture is designed and trained on the DNS fields to estimate subgrid-scale wrinkling. It is then tested on an unsteady turbulent flame where the mean inlet velocity is increased for a short time and the flame must react to a varying turbulent incoming flow. The CNN is found to efficiently extract the topological nature of the flame and predict subgrid-scale wrinkling, outperforming classical algebraic models

Le son, matériau de design

L'Étincelle, journal de la création à l'Irca