Vertical Mapping of Auditory Loudness: Loud is High, but Quiet is not Always Low

Abstract

Although the perceptual association between verticality and pitch has been widely studied, the link between loudness and verticality is not fully understood yet. While loud and quiet sounds are assumed to be equally associated crossmodally with spatial elevation, there are perceptual differences between the two types of sounds that may suggest the contrary. For example, loud sounds tend to generate greater activity, both behaviourally and neurally, than quiet sounds. Here we investigated whether this difference percolates into the crossmodal correspondence between loudness and verticality. In an initial phase, participants learned one-to-one arbitrary associations between two tones differing in loudness (82dB vs. 56dB) and two coloured rectangles (blue vs. yellow). During the experimental phase, they were presented with the two-coloured stimuli (each one located above or below a central “departure” point) together with one of the two tones.Participants had to indicate which of the two-coloured rectangles corresponded to the previously-associated tone by moving a mouse cursor from the departure point towards the target. The results revealed that participants were significantly faster responding to the loud tone when the visual target was located above (congruent condition) than when the target was below the departure point (incongruent condition). For quiet tones, no differences were found between the congruent (quiet-down) and the incongruent (quiet-up) conditions. Overall, this pattern of results suggests that possible differences in the neural activity generated by loud and quiet sounds influence the extent to which loudness and spatial elevation share representational content.

Look and ye shall hear: Selective auditory attention modulates the audiovisual correspondence effect

“…Other three-way interactions were not significant (all ps>0.4); neither was the four-way interaction (p > 0.07). Thus, critically, loudness showed no cross-modal correspondence effect, confirming previous result on its instability ( Puigcerver et al, 2019 ). Most importantly, the pitch-space effect disappeared when it became task-irrelevant, suggesting non-automaticity of the cross-modal correspondence.…”

“…However, when the attention was directed to the loudness, the pitch-space integration disappeared. Furthermore—and importantly—the study revealed no loudness-space correspondence regardless of the task (not even in the loudness identification condition), which confirms earlier observations of low reliability of audiovisual effects involving loudness and vertical space ( Puigcerver et al, 2019 ). The latter may, in turn, stem from the absence of ecological/environmental bases for such a correspondence to arise, unlike the ecologically grounded pitch-location associations ( Parise et al, 2014 ).…”

“…Very few studies have directly examined the relationship between loudness and visual position, one of the most obvious combinations being loud-up/soft-down. This type of interaction effect does not seem stable and is probably semantically mediated ( Puigcerver, Rodríguez-Cuadrado, Gómez-Tapia, & Navarra, 2019 ). Moreover, there may be no explicit experiential or sensory/acoustic basis for such a relationship.…”

“…Nevertheless, Eitan, Schupak, & Marks (2008) have found a cross-modal correspondence effect by manipulating loudness and vertical motion. Given the scarcity of loudness-verticality data and different experimental paradigms applied (e.g., moving dots presented for 1 s in the above Eitan et al, 2008 study, or learned colour-sound associations coupled with mouse tracking in Puigcerver et al, 2019 ) as well as the lack of stable results, it seems theoretically important to test the relationship in a paradigm that is more relevant to the conditions in which multisensory integration occurs. Attesting loudness-vertical space correspondence in a balanced fashion was therefore one of the goals of the present study.…”

Untitled

“…Так, слова «высокий» и «низкий» описывают и частоту звука, и пространственную высоту, воспринимаемую зрительно (Spence, 2020). Дру гими словами, судя по полученным ранее данным, эффект аудиовизуального соответствия нестабилен и, возможно, связан с устройством речевого опыта человека (Spence, 2011;Puigcerver et al, 2019). В пользу такого вывода говорят и данные о том, что носители разных языков различаются по своим пространственно-временным ассоциациям: например, в голландском языке, как и в русском, используют метафору высоты тона, а в турецком -метафору его толщины («тонким» называют высокий тон звука, а «толстым» -низкий).…”