Page 46 - Summer2022

SOUNDS FULL OF MEANING of a tongue tip /r/-trill, one variety of an r-sound that is common in many languages. A recent comprehensive study by Winter et al. (2022) has demonstrated compelling evidence for a close link between trilled /r/ and rough surface textures. A rough tex- ture can correspond to an oscillating amplitude envelope (Figure 3, bottom, red line), but to our knowledge, this idea has not yet been tested explicitly. Touch and sound are not only linked during speech production but are also connected during object manipu- lation. Moving the hands along plain paper or the bark of an old tree causes natural sounds that depend on the surface and structure of these two objects. Hence, sound and touch are related, reflecting the texture of the physi- cal world around us. Winter et al. (2022) found out that words describing rough surfaces (e.g., coarse, barbed, jagged), in com- parison to smooth ones (e.g., smooth, oily, slick), have an overrepresentation of r-sounds. To further substanti- ate their findings on the cross-modal correspondence in sound and touch, they looked at Hungarian, a language with different family roots from English. In Hungarian, similar to English, r-sounds occurred much more fre- quently in words describing rough textures. In addition, Winter et al. (2022) compared the antonym pairs rough versus smooth across 179 languages with a trilled r-sound in their sound inventory and across fur- ther 153 languages with a non-trilled r-sound (for different variations of r-sounds, see youtu.be/K9eN2B7Wj68). Only languages with a trilled r-sound, such as Finnish and Indonesian, show a higher probability of /r/ in a word for rough compared with smooth. This shows the resem- blance of touch being mapped onto the articulation and acoustics. These findings are an initial attempt to unravel correspondences between touch and sound. If we think about cross-modal correspondences during ingestion as in our initial example, it would not be surprising to find links between sound, touch, and taste as well. We are looking forward to future discoveries along such lines. Sounds Can Map to Visual Size The relationship between certain sounds and size is per- haps the most well-known example of sound symbolism. It turns out that specific speech sounds express the notion of size. The most famous example might be the one between the two vowels /a/ and /i/. In many languages, the physical size dimension is conveyed by those oppos- ing vowels (e.g., Winter and Perlman, 2021). Whereas /a/ is an open vowel, /i/ is a closed one. The radical difference in their articulation evokes the contrast. When we say “teeny tiny,” we might even squinch our eyes and lips to make the sensation even more closed and smaller. The opposite is the openness of something “large” or “huge,” with a dropped jaw and low voice. And truly, the reason behind this difference may be as simple as the fundamental frequency of the voice and certain spectral characteristics. Imagine two dogs, a 50-kg (110-lb) German shepherd and a 2.5-kg (5.5- lb) chihuahua. How do you expect their barking to sound? Certainly, even without expertise in acoustics but simply some basic life experience, you know that a 50-kg dog would have a lower pitch bark than a 2.5-kg dog. This example from the animal kingdom extends to other realms. Let us look at bowed string instruments of various sizes in Figure 4. This image stems from the Spring 2020 issue of Acoustics Today, where Carleen Hutchins’ creation of a violin octet with different resonances, but tonally matched instruments, was featured (Whitney, 2020). You Figure 4. Bowed string instruments of various sizes and tuned across a piano range. See text for details. From Whitney (2020), with permission of the New Violin Family Association. 46 Acoustics Today • Summer 2022