Sound is usually the result of actions, such as body gestures (e.g. footsteps, voice) or mechanical movements (e.g. the sound of a church bell). Therefore sound is closely related to motion. In the same way as humans are skilled in recognizing the animate character of visual motion only from a point-light display, for example corresponding to the head and the major limb-joints of a moving person, they are also very sensitive to variations of the acoustical signal in the time-frequency plane, so that it can be easy to discriminate between footstep sounds in walking and running or even identify gender, size, and emotional intention of a person walking only by listening to her/his footstep sounds.

In recent years, significant advances have been made in the study and development of techniques for musical motion data analysis and motion capture. In general, body gestures allow expressive control in sound production, and this issue must be taken into account in the context of embodied interfaces, where manipulation is mostly continuous. Interpretation of gestures enables the extraction of the expressive content in human continuous actions, such as those occurring as preparatory movements for strokes. Expressive content of gestures can be also analyzed and used for providing audio feedback. A body movement anticipating the sound production gives information about the intention of a user, smoother and slower movements will produce softer sounds, while faster and sudden movements are associated to louder sounds.

It is in this context that six experts will tackle the field of Sound and Motion from different perspectives.