Adjusting Impression of Warning Alert by Optimizing Sound Effectors Using Interactive Differential Evolution

Abstract

Warning alerts are used in situations of the earthquake and so on. In these cases, the warning impression for people is needed to quickly take shelter; however, it sometimes also affords uncomfortableness. The purpose of this study is to propose an Interactive Evolutionary Computation which adjusts the impression of the warning alert by using a set of sound effectors. The target of the search is the appropriate parameters of the effectors on the Earthquake Early Warning alert. Differential Evolution (DE) is used as an evolutionary algorithm, and the efficiency of the Interactive DE for adjusting the impression was investigated through a listening experiment. In the search step, the subjects compared two alerts and selected a better one repeatedly. In the evaluation step, the subjects evaluated the created alerts and the original alert. The results showed a significant increase in fitness by the proposed Interactive DE and effective search processes.