Affective evaluations of and reactions to exterior and interior vehicle auditory quality (original) (raw)
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Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 2003
Abstract: This study examined affective reactions to interior aircraft sounds. In Experiment 1, 20 undergraduates rated their affective reactions from listening to 18 interior aircraft sounds. In Experiment 2, another 20 undergraduates rated the cognitive/perceptual dimensions of the same sounds. In Experiment 3, an additional sample of 40 undergraduates rated affective reactions, perceived annoyance and overall quality after listening to 16 sounds. The results suggested that the affective dimensions of valence and activation reliably ...
2013
Electric vehicles are quiet at low speeds and thus potentially pose a threat to pedestrians' safety. Laws are formulating worldwide that mandate these vehicles emit sounds to alert the pedestrians of the vehicles' approach. It is necessary that these sounds promote a positive perception of the vehicle brand, and understanding their impact on soundscapes is also important. Detection time of the vehicle sounds is an important measure to assess pedestrians' safety. Emotional evaluation of these sounds influences assessment of the vehicle brand. Laboratory simulation is a new approach for evaluating exterior automotive sounds. This study describes the implementation of laboratory simulation to compare the detection time and emotional evaluation of artificial sounds for an electric vehicle. An Exterior Sound Simulator simulated audiovisual stimuli of an electric car passing a crossroad of a virtual town at 4.47 ms-1 (10 mph), from the perspective of a pedestrian standing at the crossroad. In this environment, 15 sounds were tested using experiments where participants detected the car and evaluated its sound using perceptual dimensions. Results show that these sounds vary significantly in their detection times and emotional evaluations, but crucially that traditional metrics like dB(A) do not always relate to the detection of these sounds. Detection time and emotional evaluation do not have significant correlation. Hence, sounds of a vehicle could be detected quickly, but may portray negative perceptions of the vehicle. Simulation provides a means to more fully evaluate potential electric vehicle sounds against the competing criteria.
Experience and information content affect interior vehicle sound quality assessments
International Journal of Vehicle Noise and Vibration, 2013
Recent research has found it useful to distinguish between the form and meaning of sounds. To investigate the relevance of meaning, naïve students and professional drivers listened to four levels of meaning neutralisation and four levels of spectral slope of recorded truck sound. Self-assessment of emotional reactions showed that professional drivers did not vary much in activation and rated over all lower activation than naïve participants whose affect ratings moved more or less along the annoyance correlation line in the upper left quadrant of the affect map. This gives some information about the importance of the source being recognisable and of previous user experience for product sound quality. It is further supported by that the overall difference between naïve participants' and professional drivers' ratings decreased with increasing meaning neutralisation. The methodology applied in the current study may be adopted to form homogenous panels of experts for sound evaluation.
Wow, what car is that?: Perception of exterior vehicle sound quality
Noise Control Engineering Journal, 2003
Up until now most research and application in vehicle sound quality has been directed at describing interior vehicle sound quality. Even though the interior sound of a vehicle is a major component of the perceived sound quality, exterior sound is audible both to potential users and bystanders. It may be argued that interior vehicle sound quality is concerned with meeting the buyerʼs expectation, whereas exterior sound quality concerns a) attracting attention and positive responses of potential customers and b) minimizing negative responses in the general public. It may therefore be argued that optimizing exterior sound quality will benefit both consumers and the community. This article describes an approach to perceived exterior vehicle sound quality. To attain an understanding of exterior sound, we investigate both the semantic descriptions that are elicited when different exterior sounds are heard and specific situations (i.e. a given sound/vehicle in a given environment). Across different sounds and driving conditions we find four subjective dimensions: loudness/annoyance, perceived quality, low-frequency content, and temporal variations. This factor structure allows discriminating the sound quality of a variety of modern cars. In more specific tests we find that participants both discriminate between different vehicles and different environments (free field conditions, urban driving conditions as well as different street shapes). These results indicate that designing and predicting exterior sound quality is a multidimensional task that requires different approaches than those traditionally used for interior sound quality.
Affective ratings of sound stimuli
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CITATIONS 29 READS 126 4 authors, including: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Agreement, attraction and other grammatical illusions: lexical effects on syntactic processing from a cross-linguistic perspective. View project
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The international journal of aviation psychology, 2003
Affective reactions to the interior aircraft environment are a basic constituent of perceived ride quality. This study addresses affective reactions to combinations of interior aircraft sound and vibration. In agreement with findings from environmental psychology, it was found that the combinations of six interior aircraft sounds and vibrations (no vibration, 16 Hz, and 95 Hz) gave rise to affective reactions described by two dimension s: valence (unpleasantness-pleasantness) and activation (activated-deactivated). Moreover, ...
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This study dealt with evaluation and paired comparison of noises of seven diesel cars running at idle. Participants evaluated noises' difference, indicated which one was the most appreciable, and verbally compared them when explaining the reasons of their choice. A systems method of analysis of free verbalisations allowed to quantitatively analyse the set of characteristics which are the most significant for the choice of the more pleasant sound. The results showed that emotional component was significantly present in the set of verbal characteristics of the noises' perceived quality and the 'weight' of this component in the set of evaluative characteristics was different for males and females as well as for participants with different experience of driving the investigated cars. The proposed verbal protocol analysis can be used by the supplier to evaluate influence of car noises and to identify the part of emotive attributes in their perceived quality.
Pleasantness and Unpleasantness of Environmental Sounds
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1990
The present study was done to identify environmental sounds as pleasant or unpleasant for use as stimuli. On a questionnaire of 138 pleasant and 150 unpleasant environmental sounds, students estimated the frequency of pleasant and unpleasant experiences for each sound item. More than half of the students rated 25 environmental sounds “always” or “often” pleasant and that 26 sound sources were rated as “always” or “often” unpleasant. Factor analyses (Promax) yielded 20 factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 for pleasant sounds and 27 for unpleasant sounds. Some of natural and musical sounds were pleasant for most subjects. Sounds of alarm, excretion, and scratching were unpleasant for most subjects. Some environmental sounds may be estimated as pleasant for some but unpleasant for others.
Effect of Tonal Harmonic Feature in Product Noise on Emotional Quality
2011
The product sound is an important factor that affects the product emotional quality. In the design of product sound quality, a designer needs to find the design factors that affect the emotional quality and determine the characteristics of their effects. The authors previously proposed a method for extraction of potential emotional factors by analyzing human sensitivity towards unexplored design and applied the method for designing product sound quality. From the result using vacuum cleaners as a case study, the authors found that the existence of prominent peak tones in sound has the potential to improve sound quality. However, prominent peak tones are usually regarded as a factor of annoyance. In this paper, we propose an indicator for adjusting the frequency and level of peak tones to improve a product sound quality. We have assumed that the harmonic features of peak tones in noise can be used as the indicator. We created vacuum cleaner sounds having three peak tones whose harmonic features such as tonal consonance and modality are different. To evaluate the effectiveness of the harmonic features, we conducted a pairwise comparison-based sensory evaluation with two groups of participants, one consisting of those who play some musical instrument and the other of those who do not. From the experiment, we found that the peak tone harmonic features can be perceived by both groups of participants and significantly decrease their annoyance at vacuum cleaner sounds.
The effect of (un)pleasant sounds on the visual and overall pleasantness of products
2014
A product is a nnulti-sensory object and eacli sensory property can contribute to the product experience. In this study we investigated the effect of sound (pleasant, unpleasant, original, and no sound) on the perceived pleasantness of products (i.e., visual pleasantness and overall pleasantness). Results indicate that ratings for visual and overall pleasantness are similar when no sounds are provided with the products (pictures). When participants are provided with sounds corresponding to the product, however, the overall pleasantness ratings decreased and visual pleasantness increased. Furthermore, while original and unpleasant sounds had a negative effect, pleasant sounds had a positive effect on visual and overall pleasantness ratings. We suggest that if efforts are put into improving the sound quality users will be more pleased and more willing to interact with products.