Vocal Imitations of Non-Vocal Sounds.

Guillaume Lemaitre,Nicolas Misdariis,Olivier Houix,Patrick Susini,Frédéric Voisin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0168167

Abstract

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 imitative 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.

Highlights

How would you be able to describe the sound of this new exciting electric car to your grand parents? Whereas musicians, sounds engineers, or acousticians rely on a specialized vocabulary [1], most lay persons struggle to describe their auditory experience [2, 3]
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
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

Summary

Introduction

How would you be able to describe the sound of this new exciting electric car (quiet, but not completely silent) to your grand parents? Whereas musicians, sounds engineers, or acousticians rely on a specialized vocabulary [1], most lay persons struggle to describe their auditory experience [2, 3]. After having struggled for a while to provide a verbal description of the sounds, the two persons resolved to vocalize the sounds It worked: the second person was able to retrieve the referent sound even though the verbal descriptions mismatched the actual source of the sounds (corrugated cardboard instead of kitchen paper). We replicated this example with several persons and confirmed that human speakers spontaneously rely on vocalizations and gestures to describe sounds whenever they run out of words. It studied how well listeners can identify what vocal imitations refer to

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