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Recent Findings on Sound and Posture: A Position Paper

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Book cover Bridging People and Sound (CMMR 2016)

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Abstract

Although neglected for a long time, the field of sound and posture seems to have aroused increasing interest over the last few years. In the present position paper, we present an overview of our recent findings in this field and we put them in perspective with the literature. We bring evidence to support the view that spatial cues provided by auditory information can be integrated by humans to improve their postural control. Then, two complementary trails are proposed to explain these postural effects: on the one hand, sound can be used to build a spatial mental map of the surrounding space, helping subjects to better stabilize. On the other hand, our findings suggest that some multisensory interactions occur, in which sound can facilitate the integration of the other modalities involved in the postural control.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that in this paper, we will focus on studies using comfortable level of auditory stimulation. We will neither deal with studies using high intensity noise to activate the vestibular system, as in [27] or [3], nor mention studies using sounds that convey emotion (e.g., threatening sounds, or music [12, 39]).

  2. 2.

    The sources are labeled “ecological” because they represent sounds which exist in nature, in contrast to a more abstract sound source such as pink noise. This is a reference to the ecological approach to perception developed by Gibson [16].

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the SoniMove: Inform, Guide and Learn Actions by Sounds project (ANR-14-CE24-0018- 01).

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Correspondence to Lennie Gandemer .

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Gandemer, L., Parseihian, G., Bourdin, C., Kronland-Martinet, R. (2017). Recent Findings on Sound and Posture: A Position Paper. In: Aramaki, M., Kronland-Martinet, R., Ystad, S. (eds) Bridging People and Sound. CMMR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10525. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67738-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67738-5_5

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