Gestural Embodiment of Environmental Sounds: an Experimental Study

In this paper we present an experimental study concerning gestural embodiment of environmental sounds in a listening context. The presented work is part of a project aiming at modeling movement-sound relationships, with the end goal of proposing novel approaches for designing musical instruments and sounding objects. The experiment is based on sound stimuli corresponding to “causal” and “non-causal” sounds. It is divided into a performance phase and an interview. The experiment is designed to investigate possible correlation between the perception of the “causality” of environmental sounds and different gesture strategies for the sound embodiment. In analogy with the perception of the sounds’ causality, we propose to distinguish gestures that “mimic” a sound’s cause and gestures that “trace” a sound’s morphology following temporal sound characteristics. Results from the interviews show that, first, our causal sounds database lead to consistent descriptions of the action at the origin of the sound and participants mimic this action. Second, non-causal sounds lead to inconsistent metaphoric descriptions of the sound and participants make gestures following sound “contours”. Quantitatively, the results show that gesture variability is higher for causal sounds that noncausal sounds.