We are pleased to invite you to the SIGTOUCH seminar entitled :

“Hearing social touch: the perspectives opened by skin-on-skin sonification technologies” given by Prof. Malika AUVRAY (ISIR, Sorbonne Université, Paris).

This event will take place on Thursday November, 13th at 2:00 PM in the classroom Pasteur 2 (53+0), LEW.

“Sensory conversion technologies are designed to enrich one sensory modality by information from another sensory modality. As such, they can provide access to information from a sensory modality that has been lost (like vision for the blind) or access to novel information (such as infrared light or a cardinal direction), thereby transforming and augmenting our perception of the world. Technologies aiming at restoring visual functions by means of touch and audition have been well documented, but what about the conversion of social touch? This type of conversion seems all the more timely as social isolation and digital communication increase. To investigate the possibility to allow socio-affective interactions at a distance, we build on state-of-the-art research on movement sonification and social touch. I will present three sets of studies investigating the extent to which skin-on-skin touch can be recognized at a distance, through sounds. The first study questions whether people can recognize both tactile gestures and their underlying emotional intentions through sounds. The second study focused on the respective roles of rhythm and textural properties on participants’ recognition abilities.The third study investigated the valence attributed to the audio-touch sounds through several conditions. Our results are promising for enabling meaningful social touch encounters to be accessed remotely and raise questions about the extent to which the relationship we have to distant others can be reshaped.”