Naming Sounds: Synecdoche as Association between Events, Sources, and Soundscape through Cognitive-Semantic Valorisation

Participant(s)

Activity date	30 Aug 2023
Degree of recognition	Regional

Description

The principles of the onomatopoetic-ecological origin of communicative utterances (and from there, words and language) and the limited translatability of words between languages appear contradictory. In this talk, I will review a theory from the Cresson group describing a psychological mechanism, synecdoche, to explicate how word-units might be formed in the mind of a listener. I will show how this concept comes out of Schaeffer’s sonic object and its adjoining taxology and nomenclature (naming system), and Schafer’s concept of sound event, which resides in semantic and everyday-focused topological classification schemes. This perspective has inspired my own studies into sound-word association and context-dependent taxonomies of heard sound sources. With this as a background, I will discuss a recent survey by Giordano and collaborators and how semantic labels might be designed for utilitarian purposes, such as sample banks.

Research Unit / Event Journal/Book Series