Synthesis and perception of sounds from physical interactions reveals auditory intuitive physics

Abstract

Object interactions – collisions, scraping and rolling – create many of the sounds that we hear in the world around us. These sounds are generated via lawful physical dynamics. Anecdotally, humans possess some intuitive knowledge of the physical generative processes underlying sound production, but little is known about the extent and nature of this knowledge. This thesis characterizes the auditory perception of physical object interactions, making three main contributions. First, we develop realistic contact sound synthesis tools, in part via large-scale measurements of object acoustics. Second, we show that humans solve ill-posed problem of inferring of object mass and damping by using internalized knowledge of the distribution of object resonances. Third, we provide evidence for “auditory intuitive physics” in which human listeners derive physical information through sound, maintain it over time in object representations, and compare it across sensory modalities.