Speech Science Forum - Victor Rosi

The metaphors of sound, from semantics to acoustics

In my doctoral research I explored the semantics and acoustics of key metaphorical concepts frequently employed by sound and music professionals: brightness, warmth, roundness, and roughness. In a first study, I investigated the meaning of these terms through interviews with sound experts. Drawing from the gathered verbal data and a subsequent online survey, I formulated definitions, with the aim of contributing to a lexicon for sound design. In a second study, I sought to uncover the influence of sound expertise on the perception and acoustic representation of these concepts. Using Best-Worst Scaling (BWS), I invited conductors, sound engineers and non-expert to evaluate a dataset of orchestral sounds based on the four concepts. I then predicted the BWS results with acoustic features, revealing both shared representations and differences in the perception of the four concepts between the three participant groups. The outcomes of both studies yielded an artistic contribution, shaping the composition of Quadrangulation, a music piece informed by the semantics and acoustics of the studied concepts. Aside from this work, I contributed to a collaborative research investigating the production and perception of speech social attitudes. With this project we sought the acoustic characterization and perceptual representation of four social attitudes (i.e., friendliness, distance, dominance, seduction) using the BWS method. As a result of the different BWS studies, we proposed BWSNet, an automatic model for the perceptual assessment of sounds, enabling the structuring of perceptual spaces that capture timbral concepts and speech social attitudes, all derived from BWS data.