The environment of emotions and sounds

Abstract

People’s interaction with the acoustic environment has recently been studied in various disciplines. The main problem of studying the perception of the acoustic environment is related to the variety of sound sources and the lack of a clear classification of them. The objective: to classify the acoustic environmental events based on the type of emotional impact they have. The research hypothesis is that there are acoustic events in the environment that cause basic emotions. The study is carried out on a sample of 522 respondents (n = 270 women and n = 252 men) in the 16–71 age group (the average age is 22) living in Moscow and the Moscow region. It is shown that the same sounds can be associated with completely diff erent emotions: guilt, anger, interest, disgust, sadness, contempt, joy, fear, shame, surprise. The change in emotional colouring within the framework of one acoustic event is associated with additional aspects of its description, namely: sound characteristics, localization, time, situation, social context. Creating a favorable individual acoustic environment around a person can have a therapeutic effect. It is important to create a set of emotionally coloured sounds and reconstructed acoustic events (sound scenes) that, when listened to, would cause a relatively stable emotional state. Taking into account the individual character and past experience of each person, it is possible to pick up the sounds of his/her soundscape which will help to immerse in or relive certain emotional states.

Keywords

• classification
• emotions
• sound
• verbalization
• perceived quality