When room size matters: Acoustic influences on emotional responses to sounds.

Abstract

When people hear a sound (a "sound object" or a "sound event") the perceived auditory space around them might modulate their emotional responses to it. Spaces can affect both the acoustic properties of the sound event itself and may also impose boundaries to the actions one can take with respect to this event. Virtual acoustic rooms of different sizes were used in a subjective and psychophysiological experiment that evaluated the influence of the auditory space perception on emotional responses to various sound sources. Participants (N = 20) were exposed to acoustic spaces with sound source positions and room acoustic properties varying across the experimental conditions. The results suggest that, overall, small rooms were considered more pleasant, calmer, and safer than big rooms, although this effect of size seems to disappear when listening to threatening sound sources. Sounds heard behind the listeners tended to be more arousing, and elicited larger physiological changes than sources in front of the listeners. These effects were more pronounced for natural, compared to artificial, sound sources, as confirmed by subjective and physiological measures.

The Effects of Reverberation on the Emotional Characteristics of Musical Instruments

“…Table 4 also shows that Anechoic (and to a lesser extent Small Hall Front and Large Hall Front) was the most Comic, while Large Hall Back was the least Comic. This basically agrees with Västfjäll [45] and Tajadura-Jiménez [46].…”

“…For Heroic, Large Hall Back was ranked significantly greater more often than all the other options combined. This result is in contrast to that found by Västfjäll [45] and Tajadura-Jiménez [46] since Heroic, like Happy, is also high-Valence, and they would have predicted that Heroic would have had a similar result as Happy. Table 4 also shows that Anechoic (and to a lesser extent Small Hall Front and Large Hall Front) was the most Comic, while Large Hall Back was the least Comic.…”

“…The maximum possible value is 32 and the minimum possible value is 0. The maximum for each emotional category is shown in bold (except for Shy since all its values are zero or near-zero).```````````È found by Tajadura-Jiménez [46], who found that smaller rooms were most pleasant ( Fig. 5 indicates that Happy is high-Valence or very pleasant).…”

“…They found that long reverberation times were perceived as most unpleasant. More recently, Tajadura-Jiménez et al [46] studied the correlation between emotion and room size for four natural and four artificial sounds. They also used a dimensional model with measurements for Valence, Arousal, and perceived Safeness.…”

Go-with-the-Flow: Tracking, Analysis and Sonification of Movement and Breathing to Build Confidence in Activity Despite Chronic Pain

“…The fact that the breathing sound was not accurately synchronized with their own breathing was possibly an important contributing factor. Our experience with breathing demonstrated that the position of feedback may also be an important design consideration: Sounds from behind the listener are more arousing and elicit larger physiological changes than sources in front (Tajadura-Jiménez, Larsson, Väljamäe, Västfjäll, and Kleiner, 2010). One possibility is to integrate breathing rhythms in the movement sonification, starting at the user's rhythm and then slowing and deepening (Liu, Huang, & Wang, 2011).…”