Closing the loop of sound evaluation and design (original) (raw)

Desirable Sound for Products as a Product of Design

Auditory perception is a seemingly neglected aspect of design with respect to non audio specific products. The complex subjectivity with which we perceive sounds and subsequently attribute meanings to them is extensive, as described by . If one considers that a moving image need only be rendered at twenty four frames per second to provide an effective deception of being constant, yet sound requires a much higher resolution such as the standard forty four thousand one hundred samples per second at CD quality to achieve a satisfactory auditory equivalent, this can be drawn as an indicator to the relative complexity between our auditory and visual sensory systems. This Paper will discuss the quantification and application of our sonic perception in modern design, as well as discussing the rationales for doing so.

Sounding Objects: An Overview Towards Sound Methods and Techniques to Explore Sound Within a Design Process

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Auditory Display - ICAD 2017, 2017

Sound is a neglected subject of today's products and services. The new technologies changed the way we interact with the people, objects and the world around us, thus, designers should aim at all senses, contemplating a multi sensorial experience. In this scenario sound becomes an important aspect to be considered during the project phase in a design process. Sound becomes part of the product identity and expression, the way the product talks to us. To foster this scenario designers should be aware of the possibilities and attributes of sound and how to explore them in a creative way. In this short paper we investigated published articles, workshops and publications to collect sound methods and techniques to be used into a design process. As a result, we proposed twenty essential sound methods that could be applied in a design thinking context. This is an ongoing research, part of a thesis experiment, since further methods and refinement could be added in the future.

FROM SOUND QUALITY TO SOUND SYSTEMS: RETROSPECTIVE OF SOUND STUDIES APPLICABLE TO PRODUCT DESIGN

DYNA MANAGEMENT, 2020

The current socio-technological context encourages the increase of products with increasingly complex and advanced interfaces. Sound is a valuable resource capable of facilitating interaction between product and user, and conveying information about events of different nature and criticality.However, design engineering lacks unified knowledge and a consensus methodology that facilitates the characterization of sound during product development processes. This article presents a retrospective, critical and systematic review of the most relevant theoretical and practical contributions applied in design engineering, from different scientific perspectives. The result is a map of publications classified in 6 large blocks, ranging from initial psychoacoustic studies, through observations on sound semantics, to the most up-to-date approaches supported by communication theories. In this way, researchers and developers in design engineering are provided with a guide and introduction to the main key aspects of sound study and in its application to product design domain. The article collects the main bibliographical references indicating whether they are theoretical or experimental studies, the scientific field with which they relate, their chronological location, and highlighting their main contributions.

Extraction of Latent Emotional Factors by Analyzing Human Sensitivity towards Unexplored Design: Application to Product Sound Design

Ds 58 7 Proceedings of Iced 09 the 17th International Conference on Engineering Design Vol 7 Design For X Design to X Palo Alto Ca Usa 24 27 08 2009, 2009

In the design of emotional qualities, which is evaluated by the customer's subjective impressions, feelings and emotions, one of the most important and difficult issues is setting quantitative evaluation criteria to evaluate such qualities. Without such evaluation criteria, the designer has to rely on his/her sensitivity, which may be different from the customer's, making it difficult to set a clear design goal. Most conventional approach formalizes emotional qualities expressed by adjectives using the sensory test with existing products. However, the variety of existing products is limited. The obtained evaluation criteria may not cover areas of a design space where future designs would appear. In this paper, we propose a method to cover such untouched area using composite design sample. We apply the method to extract a potential factor for the future design of product sound quality. To create such composite design samples, we set efficient design features that take into consideration the completeness of design space and the diversity of a target emotional quality that we quantify using the results of sensory tests with existing products. We conduct sensory test with composite design samples and compare the results with those from test with only existing product sound, in order to discuss changes introduced by adding composite samples. We extracted a new emotional scale of target emotional quality "expensiveness of machine sound" that was not found in the sensory test based only on the existing product sound. The emotional scale contains two different viewpoints of "reliable sound". One is associated with silent and composed sound and another is powerful and obstructed sound. Using a factor analysis considering the diversity of human sensitivities, we found those two viewpoints of "reliable sound" in first and second factors respectively. The first factor negatively related to loudness. The second factor related to lower sharpness and the existence of a perceivable peak tone around 500Hz. Most product makers are aware of the need to reduce loudness, i.e., the first factor. We extracted the second factor as a new evaluation criterion.

Keywords Sound Design, Auditory Display, Multimodal Interaction, Product Design, Interactive Arts and Music, Sound Perception and Cognition, Sound Modelling

2008

Sonic Interaction Design (SID) is an emerging field that is positioned at the intersection of auditory display, ubiquitous computing, interaction design, and interactive arts. SID can be used to describe practice and inquiry into any of various roles that sound may play in the interaction loop between users and artifacts, services, or environments, in applications that range from the critical functionality of an alarm, to the artistic significance of a musical creation. This field is devoted to the privileged role the auditory channel can assume in exploiting the convergence of computing, communication, and interactive technologies. An overemphasis on visual displays has constrained the development of interactive systems that are capable of making more appropriate use of the auditory modality. Today the ubiquity of computing and communication resources allows us to think about sounds in a proactive way. This workshop puts a spotlight on such issues in the context of the emerging domain of SID.

SounBe, a toolkit for designers dealing with sound projects

2014

The theme of multisensory product experience appears to be today very up-to-date in the design research. But even if some senses such as sight and touch have been deeply examined, other senses such as hearing still represent a gap in the current scientific research. The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative tool conceived in aid to designers dealing with sounding objects, in order to integrate this aspect into the meta-projectual phase; furthermore, this work will demonstrate the validity of the cognitive investigation methodology applied to the sound perception in design

Emotion in product sound design

Proceedings of Journées Design Sonore, 2002

Optimizing the sound quality of a product have traditionally involved minimizing negative and maximize positive user responses. Even though most product sound design works according to this principle, little is known about how the user actually respond. The need for a theory of human responses to sounds is therefore great. In this paper, we argue that product sound optimization is about emotion design. Sounds, as other environmental stimuli, evoke emotions in the listener. Thus, sound quality optimization and sound design concerns people's emotional responses to the sound. This paper will review emotion theories and their application to sound design and sound quality modeling, the measurement of emotional responses to sound, and the relationship between psychoacoustical sound descriptions and emotions. Examples from our own studies of interior/exterior product sound quality will be given. The aim is to show that in order to efficiently optimize product sound, a systematic treatment of users emotional responses is needed. Proposals for future applications of "affective sound quality" and "emotion design" will be given.

Potential of Application of Psychoacoustics to User Product Interaction Design

Product design helps people to access to technological devices through the development of a product interface. It is also capable of influencing people's interaction with others and with the environment, and of affecting the emotional response of product users, as the evolution of this activity to a new approach that can be defined as product semantics design. Thus, the product itself is a communicative system, and an understanding of it depends on the congruence of the sensorial properties perceived by the user with the concept of the product. Therefore, given that sound is one of the essential stimuli perceived by users, it is also one of the vital parameters to be configured by the designer, and the knowledge of the communicative capacities of sounds and their properties must be incorporated into the product design process. This paper reviews some of the more relevant studies in the field of sound from a perspective of its potential application to product interaction design, and critically analyses their main contributions to date and their potential application in order to contribute to the proposal for future lines of work.1