Semiotics of Sounds Evoking Motions: Categorization and Acoustic Features

Abstract

The current study is part of a larger project aiming at offering intuitive mappings of control parameters piloting synthesis models by semantic descriptions of sounds, i.e. simple verbal labels related to various feelings, emotions, gestures or motions. Hence, this work is directly related to the general problem of semiotics of sounds. We here put a special interest in sounds evoking different perceived motions. In this paper, the experimental design of the listening tests is described and the results obtained from behavioural data are discussed. Then a set of signal descriptors is compared to categories using feature selection methods. A special interest is given to applications for sound synthesis