Postdoctoral Researcher

Psychology Office: 354Q Baker Hall
Psychology Phone: 412-268-4193
Email: guillaum@andrew.cmu.edu
Faculty Mentor: Laurie Heller

Research Interests:

My research interests focus on how we perceive the sounds of our environment, and particularly the sounds made by everyday objects. When we hear such sounds, what we perceive is not, or not only, an acoustic signal with abstract properties, as color might be for vision, but "the sound of something happening". Many works have shown the great ability of human listeners to identify the events causing a sound, and to recover their properties, and my goals are to study this ability. Specifically, my current projects study how human listeners organize what they hear, and how they are able to identify the properties of the events causing sounds through categorization experiments. I am also very interested in how people use vocal imitations to communicate a sound that they have heard, or that they imagine. The results of these research might apply to develop evaluation methods for the design of sounds of everyday objects and computer interfaces, as well as to perceptually based signal processing tools.

Publications:

Guillaume Lemaitre, Arnaud Dessein, Karine Aura and Patrick Susini "Do vocal imitations enable the identification of the imitated sounds?" Proceedings of the Auditory Perception, Cognition and Action Meeting (APCAM), Boston, MA, November 2009

Guillaume Lemaitre, Olivier Houix, Nicolas Misdariis, Patrick Susini, "Listener expertise and sound identification influence the categorization of environmental sounds" Journal of Experimental psychology : applied (in press)

Patrick Susini, Guillaume Lemaitre, Stephen McAdams, "Psychological measurement for sound description and evaluation" In "Measurement with persons– Theory, methods and implementation areas" Birgitta Berglund, Giovanni B. Rossi, James Townsend and Leslie Pendrill editors, Taylor and Francis (in press)

Guillaume Lemaitre, Olivier Houix, Yon Visell, Karmen Franinovic, Nicolas Misdariis, Patrick Susini, "Toward the Design and Evaluation of Continuous Sound in Tangible Interfaces: The Spinotron" International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, special issue on Sonic Interaction Design, vol. 67, pp. 976-993, 2009

Guillaume Lemaitre, Patrick Susini, Suzanne Winsberg, Boris Letinturier, and Stephen McAdams, "The sound quality of car horns: Designing new representative sound" Acta Acustica united with Acustica, vol. 95(3), pp. 356-372, 2009

Guillaume Lemaitre, Patrick Susini, Suzanne Winsberg, Boris Letinturier, and Stephen McAdams, "The sound quality of car horns: a psychoacoustical study of timbre" Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 93(3), pp. 457-468, 2007

---

Related Links:

CMU Directory Information