Controlling the Perceived Material in an Impact Sound Synthesizer

Abstract

In this paper, we focused on the identification of the perceptual properties of impacted materials to provide an intuitive control of an impact sound synthesizer. To investigate such properties, impact sounds from everyday life objects, made of different materials (wood, metal and glass), were recorded and analyzed. These sounds were synthesized using an analysis-synthesis technique and tuned to the same chroma. Sound continua were created to simulate progressive transitions between materials. Sounds from these continua were then used in a categorization experiment to determine sound categories representative of each material (called typical sounds). We also examined changes in electrical brain activity (using event related potentials (ERPs) method) associated with the categorization of these typical sounds. Moreover, acoustic analysis was conducted to investigate the relevance of acoustic descriptors known to be relevant for both timbre perception and material identification. Both acoustic and electrophysiological data confirmed the importance of damping and highlighted the relevance of spectral content for material perception. Based on these findings, controls for damping and spectral shaping were tested in synthesis applications. A global control strategy, with a threelayer architecture, was proposed for the synthesizer allowing the user to intuitively navigate in a "material space" and defining impact sounds directly from the material label. A formal perceptual evaluation was finally conducted to validate the proposed control strategy.

The influence of cellist's postural movements on their musical expressivity

“…Concernant les sons de violon, des adjectifs reviennent souvent comme dur, lumineux, plein, chaud (harsh, bright, full, warm) [Alluri 2010] ou éffilé, sombre, clair, étroit (sharp, dark, clear, narrow ) [Stepanek 2005]. Dans un registre différent, les attributs bois, métal, verre (wood, metal, glass) ont été utilisés pour discriminer perceptivement la synthèse de sons d'impacts [Aramaki 2009, Aramaki 2011.…”

Eluding the Physical Constraints in a Nonlinear Interaction Sound Synthesis Model for Gesture Guidance

“…Concerning the object, it has been shown that the damping behavior of each partial characterizes the perceived material of an impacted object [14]. In line with this result, a damping law defined by a global and a relative damping behavior was proposed to control the perceived material in an impact sound synthesizer [15]. Concerning the action, recent studies focused on the synthesis of continuous interaction sounds such as rubbing, scratching and rolling [16][17][18].…”

“…Mapping between descriptors and signal parameters -Γ(t) represents the mapping between the descriptors and the fundamental frequency, the velocity and the pressure -f (n,0) is the n-th mode of the vibrating object (wineglass or string). Note that in each case the resonant filter bank that models the material and the shape of the object has to be calibrated accordingly [15,26] .…”

Reenacting Sensorimotor Features of Drawing Movements from Friction Sounds

“…The noise wavetable represents the profile of the surface which is rubbed. Resonant filter bank simulates the resonances of the rubbed object and is characterized by a set of frequency and bandwidth values [1,2]. This synthesis model is particularly well tuned for our study, it indeed enables to generate a synthetic friction sound which varies only according to the velocity of the gesture.…”

“…The information that enables to identify the nature of the sound source was defined as a structural invariant. For instance, it has been shown that impact sounds contain sufficient information to enable the discrimination between the materials of impacted objects [47,18,2]. The information that specifies the type of change is known as a transformational invariant.…”