Hearing gestures and drawing sounds: Auditory and multisensory perception of biological movements

International audienceUnderstanding the links between the acoustical properties of sounds produced by our actions and the properties ofthe action imagined from them is a challenge that may help to understand how our sensorimotor interaction with thesurrounding world constrains our perception and reciprocally. Here we’ll present results of recent works on theacoustic characterization of a particular category of biological movements, namely drawing movements. If we listencarefully to the friction sounds produced by someone drawing, a movement can be perceived. How do we interpretthis movement perceived from a friction sound? Is it for instance possible to recognize whether or not it is a humanmovement and can the drawn shapes be deduced from the dynamics of such sounds? To investigate thesequestions, we developed sound synthesis tools enabling the generation of virtual friction sounds which can beprecisely calibrated according to movements parameters such as the velocity. A first experiment showed that we areable to recognized biological drawing movements characterized by the 2/3 power law through kinematic relatedfriction sounds (Viviani et al., JEP:HPP 1992, Thoret et al., JEP:HPP 2014). In a second time, we showed thatkinematic related friction sounds enable the recognition of geometrical shapes and even to characterize the prototype(Rosch, 1973) of an elliptical shape. Finally, in a multimodal context, we showed that friction sounds evokingmovements may distort the visuo-motor coupling of drawing movements (Thoret et al., PLoS one, 2016). Takentogether, all these experiments reveal the role of the auditory perception in the perception and production of biologicalmovements. Moreover, it provides a new framework to investigate the relationship between sounds and movements