The influence of horizontally rotating sound on standing balance

Abstract

Postural control is known to be the result of the integration and processing of various sensory inputs by the central nervous system. Among the various afferent inputs, the role of auditory information in postural regulation has been addressed in relatively few studies, which led to conflicting results. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of a rotating auditory stimulus, delivered by an immersive 3D sound spatialization system, on the standing posture of young subjects. The postural sway of 20 upright, blindfolded subjects was recorded using a force platform. Use of various sound source rotation velocities followed by sudden immobilization of the sound was compared with two control conditions: no sound and a stationary sound source. The experiment showed that subjects reduced their body sway amplitude and velocity in the presence of rotating sound compared with the control conditions. The faster the sound source was rotating, the greater the reduction in subject body sway. Moreover, disruption of subject postural regulation was observed as soon as the sound source was immobilized. These results suggest that auditory information cannot be neglected in postural control and that it acts as additional information influencing postural regulation.

Spatial Cues Provided by Sound Improve Postural Stabilization: Evidence of a Spatial Auditory Map?

“…This decrease in sway, while in line with results from other static sound studies, is slight compared to our previous rotating sound study, in which subjects reached a decrease in sway of about 30% (Gandemer et al, 2014). In the present experiment, even in the 3-source conditions, subjects still had less auditory information available than with rotating sound (no variation in acoustic cues, and only three discrete spatial positions for sound).…”

“…Some researchers refer to an “auditory anchorage” effect (Deviterne et al, 2005), under the hypothesis that the spatial information provided by static sound sources can help subjects to construct a representation of the space surrounding them, and thus better stabilize. When we compare the results of our rotating sound study (Gandemer et al, 2014) (roughly 30% decrease in sway) to those of the static sound studies (roughly 10% decrease in sway), it is clear that moving sources (with the direction rather than the distance varying) lead to better stabilization. We assume that rotating sound provides more spatial information, as the acoustic cues vary and the source travels all around the subject.…”

“…The authors concluded that the attention paid to the stimulus led subjects to take into account the spatial information it carried. A previous study by our team was conducted in a similar paradigm: subjects were asked to focus on a pink noise sound source rotating around them at various speed (Gandemer et al, 2014). Subjects also exhibited a significant decrease in sway in the presence of the rotating sound source (up to 30%) compared to absence of sound or a single static sound source facing them.…”

Walking With Ears: Altered Auditory Feedback Impacts Gait Step Length in Older Adults

“…Several studies have observed that external environmental sounds can act as a reference for controlling aspects of walking such as body posture and orientation (Karim et al, 2018) and can improve standing postural balance (Easton et al, 1998;Deviterne et al, 2005;Kanegaonkar and Amin, 2012;Gandemer et al, 2014;Rumalla et al, 2015;Horowitz et al, 2019). A considerable body of research has suggested that during walking, control of frontalplane motion requires greater involvement of the nervous system than sagittal-plane motions (MacKinnon and Winter, 1993;Bauby and Kuo, 2000;O'Connor and Kuo, 2009;McAndrew et al, 2010).…”

The influence of cellist's postural movements on their musical expressivity

“…Plus précisément, les mécanismes évolués du système de planification motrice lors de l'écoute, modulerait l'activité de systèmes plus primitifs comme les réflexes vestibulo-spinaux et la synchronisation sensori-motrice. Notons enfin que des études récentes soutiennent l'influence de la rythmique du son (vitesses de rotation sonore dans un système ambisonique) sur la stabilisation posturale en station debout [Gandemer 2014]. …”