Product sounds: Basic concepts and categories

Product sounds: Basic concepts and categories

Ozcan Vieira, E.
Van Egmond, R.
Jacobs, J.J.

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

2014-12-31

In this paper we investigated which categories of product sounds listeners can distinguish. We explored the perceptual domain of product sounds in order to be able to derive perceptually similar categories and determine how users are able to describe these categories by merely listening to them. Employing two different experimental paradigms (free categorization and pairwise comparison), we determined six perceptually relevant product sound categories (air, alarm, cyclic, impact, liquid, mechanical) and nine basic concepts that mentally represent these categories (sound source, action, location, sound type, onomatopoeias, psychoacoustics, temporal descriptions, emotions, abstract meaning). The results indicate that these categories are not only a direct consequence of perceptual similarities in the spectral temporal structure but also result from similarities based on cognitive, emotional, and contextual evaluations of the sound. We conclude that sound is an intrinsic property of a product and, with the knowledge gathered in this study, designers will be able to relate the auditory property of a product to the overall product experience. In addition, this paper presents two methods for the perceptual evaluation of product sounds.

product sounds
sound categories
multi-sensory design
sound design
categorization

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:30b0fa53-9ea1-4e68-8201-0eeb98e345f4

Chinese Institute of Design

1991-3761

International Journal of Design, 8 (3), 2014

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2014 The Author(s)
Copyright for this article is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the International Journal of Design. All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.