Auditory perception of the thickness of plates.

Abstract

This study focuses on the auditory perception of plate thickness and investigates acoustic cues that evoke thickness in the context of sound synthesis. Three hypotheses are proposed and tested through a listening test, examining the influence of damping, nonlinear phenomena, and modal frequencies on the perceived thickness of sound sources. The stimuli are generated using the numerical resolution of the Föppl-von Kármán system. We confirm that increasing the overall damping leads to an increased perceived thickness. Additionally, the emergence of an energy cascade toward higher frequencies (characteristic of thin plates) for impacts of increasing intensity evokes a thinner object.