Sonification of directional and emotional content: Description of design challenges

Abstract

In the construction of sound objects into an application, the designer's skills to communicate through sounds is the cornerstone of the activity. In such an expertise, the knowledge about the human way of interpreting different properties of sounds is essential. This paper is a description of two experiments, in which the semantics of tempo change, pitch change and intensity change of sound has been studied by asking the participants of the experiments to combine sounds to visual images. The images in the first experiment were photos which had been validated in terms of their emotional content. In the second experiment, the images were arrows pointing in various directions. The results show that studying context independent semantics of non-speech sounds with the help of photos is problematic, but some tendencies can be revealed. On the other hand, simple information units like physical directions, can be illustrated with changes in intensity and tempo, but especially with change in pitch.