Anders Genell

Vibrations can have both negative and positive effects on the perception of sound

In a listening test participants were asked to rate their impression of product sound quality of truck sounds combined with steering wheel vibrations. The set-up also contained stimuli where one of two harmonics in the sound was suppressed, corresponding to the most salient peaks in the vibration spectrum. Sound and vibrations were rated as more annoying, tiring, rumbling and of lesser quality than the sound alone. Sound and vibrations were however also rated as more powerful, suggesting a positive contribution to the product sound quality. Only tendencies towards the expected mismatch effects for vibrations lacking their auditory counterpart were found.

Components in Evaluation of cOmplex Interior Truck Sounds

In order to investigate influences on assessment of interior truck sounds two experiments have been carried out with emphasis on the low frequency content. In the first experiment the participants were presented with recorded sound from the interior of a truck cabin, with different alterations of the low frequency content. In the second experiment the balance between low and high frequency content was altered for the recorded sounds. Three main dimensions important for the assessment of truck sounds were found: an Annoyance factor, a Wakefulness factor and a Quality factor. Additionally it was found that a well-suited spectral balance could improve positive impressions of truck sound.

Multi-sensory congruence in vehicle sound quality assessment: Effects of vibration and irrelevant emotional primes on affective reactions and evaluations of product sounds:

Abstract A listening test was performed where a group of professional truck drivers were asked to rate their impressions of binaurally recorded interior truck sound of different levels, while subjected to different vibration levels in the steering wheel and in the foot rest of a truck simulator. The hypothesis was that, if the sound and vibrations had the same relative levels as the original environment inside a real truck cabin, the emotional reactions would not be as negative as if either of the modalities was significantly increased relative to the other. The results indicate some support for this hypothesis. In addition, the effects of irrelevant emotional primes on sound quality assessment were studied. The results are discussed in relation to multi-modal theories of emotional sound design for vehicle interiors.

Form and content in emotional reactions to sounds

People react emotionally to auditory stimuli. Despite this fact relatively little is known how sounds can create emotional reactions in listeners. We have developed a framework, the Emotion Reaction Model (ERM), that predict that both form features (i.e classical psychophysical attributes such as loudness, sharpness etc) and content feratures (i.e. psychological associations to the sound producing source). Using ERM we tested the relative contribution of form vs. content in producing emotional reactions to sounds. In a first experiment, participants rated their emotional reactions to sounds from qualitatively different categories (animals, humans, machine noise) and to same sounds with time or frequency scrambling applied (thus rendering them difficult to identify, but with retained psychoacoustical properties). Experiments 2 used the same sounds but with a priming procedure and experiment 3 assessed emotional reactions using physiological measures. Overall, content, rather than form, appeared to have the...