Breakthroughs Clause Samples

Breakthroughs. Incorporating vocal and gestural sketching in the design process will allow the designers to exploit the functional and aesthetic possibilities of sound. Hence, designers will be able to use their voice and hands to sketch sonic behaviors, with just the same naturalness, efficiency, and expressiveness they use while drawing on paper. Three breakthroughs are necessary to achieve this goal. First, the SkAT-VG project will need to under- stand how non-verbal vocalizations and manual gestures are related to sound perception. SkAT-VG starts from several hypotheses that will be assessed during the project. These hypotheses are that listeners identify the mechanical events at the source of everyday sounds; That these different sound events are communi- cated through articulatory gestures recognized by the listeners; And that the fine temporal evolution of the sounds, as well as expressive intentions of the producer, are highlighted by manual gestures. Therefore, major new insights as regards sound perception and identification are expected. Studying vocal imitations and imitative gestures of sounds is expected to increase our understanding of how the human cognition deals with identification of the auditory environment, now considered as one of the most important functions of audition, because they allow identification through simplification and exaggeration of features. Studying the articulatory phonology of non-verbal vocalizations is expected to produce important new results in phonol- ogy, since this type of signal has almost never been studied. The original approach enabled by the SkAT-VG consortium, consisting in two perspectives - phonetic production and sound perception - will facilitate this objective. The second breakthrough will result from the development of tools that convert the designer’s vocalisa- tions and gestures into usable sound design materials. For example, if a designer says “I want this electric car to make a wooeeeeesh sound when I turn it on” and rapidly raises up her hands, it should be possible to convert the “wooooeeeesh" into a synthetic sound with a rapid pitch sweep that can be actually reproduced, modified, and refined, until it is actually ready to be included into a prototype. This task is only apparently simple, as it implies the understanding of how humans produce, perceive and make sense of non-verbal vocalizations and manual gestures. In fact, the scientific advances introduces by the SkAT-VG project will also have an impac...