L'invention technique liée à la transcription du son a toujours eu une incidence majeure sur la connaissance de musiques de traditions orales. La gravure directe du son, bien-sûr, a permis d'ouvrir le champ d'une musicologie comparative. Di

14 mars 2014 01 h 09 min

SpeaK is a sound lexicon that offers definitions of main sound properties. Each term of the lexicon is illustrated by sound examples that have been created or recorded on purpose, in order to highlight the given property. The tool is embedd... Max interface, developed by Frederic Voisin, that can be...

17 mars 2021 18 min

D'important travaux ont été menés à l'Ircam depuis plusieurs années sur la description perceptive, acoustique et sémantique du timbre (McAdams et al., 1995; Faure, 2000; Peeters et al., 2011). Plus récemment, dans le cadre de la thèse de Ma... appelé SpeaK développé par Frédéric Voisin. L'outil a notamment...

13 janvier 2021 01 h 15 min

Dans le cadre d’une articulation entre recherches en perception et en design sonores, l’équipe PDS développe depuis quelques temps – mais sur la base de travaux antérieurs notamment relatifs à la verbalisation et la perception du timbre des... (patch Max) développée par Frédéric Voisin, et permet, en...

4 mars 2020 18 min

G. Lemaitre, O. Houix, F. Voisin, G. Peeters, F. Bevilacqua, J. Françoise, N. Misdariis, P. Susini, équipes : Perception et design sonores, Analyse et synthèse des sons, Interaction son musique mouvement, présenteront :

10 décembre 2014 01 h 06 min

The OM Composer's Book, 1, Frédéric Voisin

Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Nov 2016, Honolulu, United States. pp.3390 - 3390, Nicolas Misdariis, Olivier Houix, Guillaume Lemaître, Frédéric Voisin, Patrick Susini

Sounds are notably difficult to describe. It is thus not surprising that human speakers often use many imitative vocalizations to communicate about sounds. In practice,vocal imitations of non-speech everyday sounds (e.g. the sound of a car passing by) arevery effective: listeners identify sounds better with vocal imitations than with verbal descriptions, despite the fact that vocal imitations are often inaccurate, constrained by the human vocal apparatus. The present study investigated the semantic representations evoked by vocal imitations by experimentally quantifying how well listeners could match sounds to category labels. Itcompared two different types of sounds: human vocal imitations, and computational auditory sketches (created by algorithmic computations), both based on easily identifiable sounds (sounds of human actions and manufactured products). The results show that performance with the best vocal imitations was similar to the best auditory sketches for most categories of sounds.More detailed analyses showed that the acoustic distance between vocal imitations and referent sounds is not sufficient to account for such performance. They suggested that instead of reproducing the acoustic properties of the referent sound as accurately as vocally possible, vocal imitations focus on a few important features dependent on each particular sound category.

International Symposium on Gesture Studies (ISGS), 2016, Paris, France. pp.1780 - 1780, Jules Françoise, Guillaume Lemaître, Frédéric Voisin, Frédéric Bevilacqua, Hugo Scurto, Patrick Susini

Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Nov 2016, Honolulu, United States. pp.3390 - 3390, Nicolas Misdariis, Olivier Houix, Guillaume Lemaître, Frédéric Voisin, Patrick Susini

Sounds are notably difficult to describe. It is thus not surprising that human speakers often use many imitative vocalizations to communicate about sounds. In practice,vocal imitations of non-speech everyday sounds (e.g. the sound of a car passing by) arevery effective: listeners identify sounds better with vocal imitations than with verbal descriptions, despite the fact that vocal imitations are often inaccurate, constrained by the human vocal apparatus. The present study investigated the semantic representations evoked by vocal imitations by experimentally quantifying how well listeners could match sounds to category labels. Itcompared two different types of sounds: human vocal imitations, and computational auditory sketches (created by algorithmic computations), both based on easily identifiable sounds (sounds of human actions and manufactured products). The results show that performance with the best vocal imitations was similar to the best auditory sketches for most categories of sounds.More detailed analyses showed that the acoustic distance between vocal imitations and referent sounds is not sufficient to account for such performance. They suggested that instead of reproducing the acoustic properties of the referent sound as accurately as vocally possible, vocal imitations focus on a few important features dependent on each particular sound category.

the 170th ASA meeting, Nov 2015, Jacksonville, United States. pp.1780. Jules Françoise, Guillaume Lemaître, Frédéric Voisin, Frédéric Bevilacqua, Hugo Scurto, Patrick Susini

Communicating about sounds is a difficult task without a technical language, and naïve speakers often rely on different kinds of non-linguistic vocalizations and body gestures (Lemaitre et al. 2014). Previous work has independently studied how effectively people describe sounds with gestures or vocalizations (Caramiaux, 2014, Lemaitre and Rocchesso, 2014). However, speech communication studies suggest a more intimate link between the two processes (Kendon, 2004). Our study thus focused on the combination of manual gestures and nonspeech vocalizations in the communication of sounds. We first collected a large database of vocal and gestural imitations of a variety of sounds (audio, video, and motion sensor data). Qualitative analysis of gestural strategies resulted in three hypotheses:(1) voice is more effective than gesture for communicating rhythmic information, (2) textural aspects are communicated with shaky gestures, and (3) concurrent streams of sound events can be split between gestures and voice. These hypotheses were validated in a second experiment in which 20 participants imitated 25 specifically synthesized sounds: rhythmic noise bursts, granular textures, and layered streams. Statistical analyses compared acoustics features of synthesized sounds, vocal features, and a set of novel gestural features based on a wavelet representation of the acceleration data.

PLoS ONE, 2016, 66, pp.128 - 128. Nicolas Misdariis, Olivier Houix, Guillaume Lemaître, Frédéric Voisin, Patrick Susini

Imitative behaviors are widespread in humans, in particular whenever two persons communicate and interact. Several tokens of spoken languages (onomatopoeias, ideophones, and phonesthemes) also display different degrees of iconicity between the sound of a word and what it refers to. Thus, it probably comes at no surprise that human speakers use a lot of imi-tative vocalizations and gestures when they communicate about sounds, as sounds are notably difficult to describe. What is more surprising is that vocal imitations of non-vocal everyday sounds (e.g. the sound of a car passing by) are in practice very effective: listeners identify sounds better with vocal imitations than with verbal descriptions, despite the fact that vocal imitations are inaccurate reproductions of a sound created by a particular mechanical system (e.g. a car driving by) through a different system (the voice apparatus). The present study investigated the semantic representations evoked by vocal imitations of sounds by experimentally quantifying how well listeners could match sounds to category labels. The experiment used three different types of sounds: recordings of easily identifiable sounds (sounds of human actions and manufactured products), human vocal imitations, and computational " auditory sketches " (created by algorithmic computations). The results show that performance with the best vocal imitations was similar to the best auditory sketches for most categories of sounds, and even to the referent sounds themselves in some cases. More detailed analyses showed that the acoustic distance between a vocal imitation and a referent sound is not sufficient to account for such performance. Analyses suggested that instead of trying to reproduce the referent sound as accurately as vocally possible, vocal imitations focus on a few important features, which depend on each particular sound category. These results offer perspectives for understanding how human listeners store and access long-term sound representations, and sets the stage for the development of human-computer interfaces based on vocalizations.

Leonardo Music Journal, 1994, 4, Frédéric Voisin

Contemporary Music Review, 1993, 9 (1-2), pp.13 - 19. Vincent Dehoux, Frédéric Voisin