Paving the way for social touch at a distance: sonifying tactile interactions and their underlying emotions

Social touch is crucial for human well-being, as a lack of tactile interactions increases anxiety, loneliness and need for social support. To address the detrimental effects of social isolation, we build on cutting-edge research on social touch and movement sonification to investigate whether social tactile gestures could be perceived through sounds, a sensory channel giving access to remote information. Four experiments investigated participants’ perception of auditory stimuli that were recorded with our ‘audio-touch’ sonification technique, which captures the sounds of touch. In the first experiment, participants correctly categorized sonified skin-on-skin tactile gestures (i.e., stroking, rubbing, tapping, hitting). In the second experiment, the audio-touch sample consisted of the sonification of six socio-emotional intentions conveyed through touch (i.e., anger, attention, fear, joy, love, sympathy). Participants’ valence ratings of the underlying touch were coherent with the intended emotions, while their categorization presented more variability. In two additional experiments investigating the characteristics of the surface involved in the tactile interactions (i.e skin or object), skin proved to be a critical factor in the auditory categorization of both gestural and emotional audio-touch stimuli. This result reveals that human skin-on-skin interactions convey information which sets them apart, perceptually, from object-on-object interactions. Our research thus unveils that social touch can be perceived through sounds, when they are obtained with our specific sonifying methodology, tailored for skin-on-skin interactions. This bears great promise for giving remote access, through the auditory channel, to meaningful social touch interactions.