Hearing aid users often report that some everyday sounds are abnormally intrusive or salient. This issue may stem from distorted coding of sound features due to peripheral impairments and/or hearing aid processing. This study investigates whether aided hearing-impaired (aHI) listeners experience (1) abnormal loudness processing and (2) distorted timbre perception, both of which may contribute to this problem. In Experiment 1, we measured loudness functions using sounds varying in four timbre dimensions (brightness, spectral flux, attack time, roughness) in normal-hearing (NH) and aHI listeners. In Experiment 2, we assessed timbre perception via dissimilarity judgments based on a similar set of sounds. We tested NH listeners with and without a hearing loss simulator and a hearing aid simulator, as well as aHI listeners with the hearing aid simulator. The results of Experiment 1 revealed steeper loudness functions in aHI participants, in particular for low-to-moderate level sounds with center frequency above 1 kHz, suggesting that hearing aids fail to fully restore normal loudness growth above a certain degree of threshold loss. The characterization of timbre perception in aHI listeners obtained in Experiment 2 showed enhanced weighting of temporal envelope features, likely emphasized by hearing aid expansion at low level, as well as non-linear distortions in the perceptual coding of roughness. These findings suggest that both loudness and timbre dimensions are distorted in aided impaired hearing. We propose that these distortions may underlie the excessive salience of certain everyday sounds, though direct measurement of salience effects will be important in future work.

Electric vehicles are now part of the everyday automotive landscape. The resulting sonic experience is a major challenge for driver comfort. Despite this challenge being known, no solution reaching general consensus has yet been proposed. This might be due to the lack of a common culture of the sound or the expected sonic target in electric vehicles, in opposition to what existed for thermal engine. This work proposes a decisive tool to enhance communication on sound description in the electric car cabin. Inspired by soundscape studies, the methodology consists in using a semi-structured questionnaire oriented toward sound description and judgment with 12 acousticians working on electric vehicles. A verbal analysis identifies 11 specific sound names describing this sonic environment. Definitions that include three levels of description: causal, reduced and hedonic as well as audio illustrations, are proposed for each sound name. The lexicon is validated by the same group of acousticians and available online.

While research on auditory attention in complex acoustical environment is a thriving field, experimental studies thus far have typically treated participants as passive listeners. The present study—which combined real-time covert loudness manipulations and online probe detection—investigates for the first time to our knowledge, the effects of acoustic salience on auditory attention during live interactions, using musical improvisation as an experimental paradigm. We found that musicians were more likely to pay attention to a given co-performer when this performer was made sounding louder or softer; that such salient effect was not owing to the local variations introduced by our manipulations but rather likely to be driven by the more long-term context; and that improvisers tended to be more strongly and more stably coupled when a musician was made more salient. Our results thus demonstrate that a meaningful change of the acoustical context not only captured attention but also impacted the ongoing musical interaction itself, highlighting the tight relationship between attentional selection and interaction in such social scenarios and opening novel perspectives to address whether similar processes are at play in human linguistic interactions.

This study addresses how salience shapes the perceptual organization of an auditory scene. A psychophysical task that was introduced previously by Susini, Jiaouan, Brunet, Houix, and Ponsot [(2020). Sci. Rep. 10(1), 16390] was adapted to assess how the ability of non-musicians and expert musicians to detect local/global contour changes in simple hierarchically-organized tone sequences is affected by the relative salience of local information in the timbre dimension. Overall, results show that salience enhanced local processing capacities, at the cost of global processing, suggesting a bottom-up reallocation of attention. Interestingly, for non-musicians, salience caused a reversal of the basic global-over-local processing prioritization as it is typically observed in expert musicians.

On the basis of initial results related to modulations of auditory salience— the ability to capture attention—by timbre attributes (especially, brightness and roughness), the present study investigates auditory salience as a predictor of perceived pleasantness in environmental sound scenes. A new paradigm was set up to measure continuous pleasantness while observing the impact of specific events, in a corpus of 11 various soundscapes. Specific events were found to affect perceived pleasantness, in a source-dependent direction in line with the literature. In addition, causality analyses examined the impact of temporal salience predictions on pleasantness ratings, along with other indices (equivalent sound level, loudness, or timbre attributes). They showed that salience was the best predictor of pleasantness, ahead of loudness, level or brightness and roughness. Nonetheless, the last two turned out to play, as well, a significant role in the pleasantness percept. Therefore, auditory salience is confirmed as a relevant indicator for assessing the perception of soundscapes, and the identification of sound sources that compose them is also confirmed to be crucial in this assessment.

The first meetings of a sound design project aim to present the request which may concern the identity of a brand or the emotion associated with a new product. It is then crucial to elaborate recommendations for the sound designer. However, the major difficulty encountered is to specify the request in terms of sound features. The Speak methodology is based on an efficient co-design workshop to help participants, ranging from the project manager to the communication manager, to specify their request with words related to sound features. Frist, a lexicon composed of 35 words often used by professionals is presented to the participants; each word is related to a sound feature explained by a definition and highlighted by a corpus of sound examples. Then, a card game is provided to each participant; each card is associated with a word from the lexicon. The rule during the workshop is to use only the cards to describe the desired audible intention; each participant can select or reject a word, and exchange with other participants focusing only on the sound features. Finally, participants are actively involved in the process to develop sound recommendations. During the presentation, we will focus on a specific project.

The disappearance of the main source of noise with electric vehicles resulted in a breakthrough in car cabin sound experience. Despite significantly lowering the sound level pressure, one cannot claim perfect quietness is achieved. Indeed, as the auditory masking produced by the internal combustion engine is not effective anymore, unsuspected sounds such as electric whistling, whining or switching are now part of this sound environment and may be identified as unpleasant sounds. However, drivers' expectations are to have audible feedback indicative of vehicle operation that matches their expectations. Therefore, the presence of unwanted and unpleasant sounds, on the one hand, and the absence of desired and informative sounds, on the other hand, is an opportunity for sound design to create a new sound environment inside car cabins. The present work proposes a "sonic augmented" concept based on the idea of adding designed sounds, called "masks", participating both in the overall soundscape augmentation and in the attenuation of unpleasant sounds, called "defects". Sound design strategies with different parametrizations will be presented, as well as the results of two perceptive experiments whit the aims at evaluating the impact on perceptive attenuation of "defects" and the overall sound quality.

Attention allows the listener to select relevant information from their environment, and disregard what is irrelevant. However, irrelevant stimuli sometimes manage to capture it and stand out from a scene because of bottom-up processes driven by salient stimuli. This attentional capture effect was observed using an implicit approach based on the additional singleton paradigm. In the auditory domain, it was shown that sound attributes such as intensity and frequency tend to capture attention during auditory search (cost to performance) for targets defined on a different dimension such as duration. In the present study, the authors examined whether a similar phenomenon occurs for attributes of timbre such as brightness (related to the spectral centroid) and roughness (related the amplitude modulation depth). More specifically, we revealed the relationship between the variations of these attributes and the magnitude of the attentional capture effect. In experiment 1, the occurrence of a brighter sound (higher spectral centroid) embedded in sequences of successive tones produced significant search costs. In experiments 2 and 3, different values of brightness and roughness confirmed that attention capture is monotonically driven by the sound features. In experiment 4, the effect was found to be symmetrical: positive or negative, the same difference in brightness had the same negative effect on performance. Experiment 5 suggested that the effect produced by the variations of the two attributes is additive. This work provides a methodology for quantifying the bottom-up component of attention and brings new insights on attention capture and auditory salience.

Previous work investigating how non-musicians and expert musicians process local (musical intervals) and global information (melodic contour) in a local-global task (LGT) shed light on a processing style developed by expert musicians that prioritizes local compared to global temporal information (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-72423-7). The goal of the present work was to further address the mechanisms underlying this perceptual reorganization, in particular how it relates to auditory streaming capacities. To this end, we here considered listeners spanning a wider range of musical expertise: in addition to non-musicians (N=10) and expert musicians (N=8), a group of amateur musicians was recruited (N=8), represented by individuals with occasional solo instrumental practice but no prior theoretical training. All participants performed the LGT, as well as an interleaved melody recognition task (IMRT) taken from previous works on auditory streaming that requires the parsing of information along the frequency dimension. In the LGT, results supported previous evidence of a global advantage for non-musicians and a local advantage for expert musicians, and revealed a trend towards a local advantage for amateur musicians. In the IMRT, expert musicians outperformed both non-musicians and amateur musicians, who both had comparable poorer performance. A working memory test and a questionnaire surveying the level of musical expertise of the participants were also conducted. Taken together, our results suggest that, on the one hand, amateur musicians develop a trend to favor local compared to global information, similar to expert musicians, which is associated with their development of working memory; on the other hand, their performance for segregating a target melodic stream from another stream along the frequency dimension remains as poor as that of non-musicians. Overall, our data suggest that the perceptual reorganization of auditory information associated with musical learning takes place as a sequential reconfiguration: compared to the early change of processing style observed on the temporal dimension, the development of processing skills specific to the frequency dimension would require a higher degree of auditory expertise, that we suggest could be associated with collective musical practice.

Communication between sound and music experts is based on the shared understanding of a metaphorical vocabulary derived from other sensory modalities. Yet, the impact of sound expertise on the mental representation of these sound concepts remains blurry. To address this issue, we investigated the acoustic portraits of four metaphorical sound concepts (brightness, warmth, roundness, and roughness) in three groups of participants (sound engineers, conductors, and non-experts). Participants (N=24) rated a corpus of orchestral instrument sounds (N=520) using Best-Worst Scaling. With this data-driven method, we sorted the sound corpus for each concept and population. We compared the population ratings and ran machine learning algorithms to unveil the acoustic portraits of each concept. Overall, the results revealed that sound engineers were the most consistent. We found that roughness is widely shared while brightness is expertise dependent. The frequent use of brightness by expert populations suggests that its meaning got specified through sound expertise. As for roundness and warmth, it seems that the importance of pitch and noise in their acoustic definition is the key to distinguishing them. These results provide crucial information on the mental representations of a metaphorical vocabulary of sound and whether it is shared or refined by sound expertise.

Temporal and frequency auditory streaming capacities were assessed for non-musician (NM), expert musician (EM), and amateur musician (AM) listeners using a local-global task and an interleaved melody recognition task, respectively. Data replicate differences previously observed between NM and EM, and reveal that while AM exhibits a local-over-global processing change comparable to EM, their performance for segregating a melody embedded in a stream remains as poor as NM. The observed group partitioning along the temporal-frequency auditory streaming capacity map suggests a sequential, two-step development model of musical learning, whose contributing factors are discussed.

When designing sound evaluation experiments, researchers rely on listening test methods, such as rating scales (RS). In this work, we investigated the suitability of best-worst scaling (BWS) — a relative judgment method — for the perceptual evaluation of sound qualities. To do so, 20 participants rated the ‘brightness’ of a corpus of instrumental sounds (N=100) with RS and BWS methods. Our results show that BWS is equivalent to RS in terms of performance, participants’ impression, and duration. Interestingly, participants preferred the BWS over RS. Therefore, BWS is an alternative that reliably measure perceptual sound qualities and could be used in many-sounds paradigm.

MUSIC OR SOUND PROFESSIONALS USE SPECIFIC TERminology to communicate about timbre. Some key terms do not come from the sound domain and do not have a clear definition due to their metaphorical nature. This work aims to reveal shared meanings of four well-used timbre attributes: bright, warm, round, and rough. We conducted two complementary studies with French sound and music experts (e.g., composers, sound engineers, sound designers, musicians, etc.). First, we led interviews to gather definitions and instrumental sound examples for the four attributes (N = 32). Second, using an online survey, we tested the relevance and consensus on multiple descriptions most frequently evoked during the interviews (N = 51). The analysis of the rich corpus of verbalizations from the interviews yielded the main description strategies used by the experts, namely acoustic, metaphorical, and source-related. We also derived definitions for the attributes based on significantly relevant and consensual descriptions according to the survey results. Importantly, the definitions rely heavily on metaphorical descriptions. In sum, this study presents an overview of the shared meaning and perception of four metaphorical timbre attributes in the French language.

The paper presents a specific sound design process implemented upon a collaboration with an important stakeholder of the wine (Champagne) industry. The goal of the project was to link sound properties with oenological dimensions in order to compose a sonic environment able to realise a multisensory experience during the wine tasting protocol. This creation has resulted from a large scale methodological approach based on the semantic transformation concept (from wine words to sound words) and deployed by means of a codesign method – after having shared respective skills of each field (sound and oenology). A precise description of the workflow is detailed in the paper, The outcomes of the work are presented, either in terms of realisation or conceptual knowledge acquisition. Then, future perspectives for the following of the work are sketched, especially regarding the notion of evaluation. The whole approach is finally put in the broad conceptual framework of ‘sciences of sound design’ that is developed and argued in the light of this study.