Human inference of force from impact sounds: Perceptual evidence for inverse physics

TitleHuman inference of force from impact sounds: Perceptual evidence for inverse physics
Publication TypeConference Abstract
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsTraer, J, McDermott, JH
Conference NameAnnual Meeting of the Acoustical Society
Volume143
Issue3
Date Published03/2018
Abstract

An impact sound is determined both by material properties of the objects involved (e.g., mass, density, shape, and rigidity) and by the force of the collision. Human listeners can typically estimate the force of an impact as well as the material which has been struck. To investigate the underlying auditory mechanisms we played listeners audio recordings of two boards being struck and measured their ability to identify the board struck with more force. Listeners significantly outperformed models based on simple acoustic features (e.g., signal power or spectral centroid). We repeated the experiment with synthetic sounds generated from simulated object resonant modes and simulated contact forces derived from a spring model. Listeners could not distinguish synthetic from real recordings and successfully estimated simulated impact force. When the synthetic modes were altered (e.g., to simulate a harder material) listeners altered their judgments of both material and impact force, consistent with the physical implications of the alteration. The results suggest that humans use resonant modes to infer object material, and use this knowledge to estimate the impact force, explaining away material contributions to the sound.

URLhttps://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.5035721
DOI10.1121/1.5035721
Reprint Edition Published Online: April 2018
Citation Key3576

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