Factor analysis of the perception of the evaluation of environmental sounds using adjectives describing sound quality, emotional state, and information carried by sounds

Abstract

In order to investigate into the perception of environmental sounds, a psychoacoustic experiment was carried out. The experiment was performed with the SD (semantic differential) method using 66 environmental sounds for 39 pairs of the descriptive adjectives in Japanese. These pairs of descriptive adjectives are roughly divided into three groups. One of them was adjectives describing sound quality that had been used in similar studies reported so far. The other groups were adjectives describing emotional states of evaluators due to the sounds and information carried by sounds in addition to them. The new adjectives were selected for explaining a more general state of perception of the environmental sounds. As the result of a factor analysis, five factors were obtained. Three of them were factors describing ‘‘aesthetic state,’’ ‘‘volume,’’ and ‘‘brightness’’ of sounds. These factors correspond to the three well-known factors describing sound quality. Other than these, two new factors were derived: a factor concerning information on environment and a factor concerning the significance of sound. Moreover, it was shown that emotional states produced by environmental sounds correlate with the factor concerning the aesthetic state.