Abstract
This paper presents two experiments focusing on perception of mechanical sounds produced by expressive robot movement and blended sonifications thereof. In the first experiment, 31 participants evaluated emotions conveyed by robot sounds through free-form text descriptions. The sounds were inherently produced by the movements of a NAO robot and were not specifically designed for communicative purposes. Results suggested no strong coupling between the emotional expression of gestures and how sounds inherent to these movements were perceived by listeners; joyful gestures did not necessarily result in joyful sounds. A word that reoccurred in text descriptions of all sounds, regardless of the nature of the expressive gesture, was “stress”. In the second experiment, blended sonification was used to enhance and further clarify the emotional expression of the robot sounds evaluated in the first experiment. Analysis of quantitative ratings of 30 participants revealed that the blended sonification successfully contributed to enhancement of the emotional message for sound models designed to convey frustration and joy. Our findings suggest that blended sonification guided by perceptual research on emotion in speech and music can successfully improve communication of emotions through robot sounds in auditory-only conditions.
Highlights
Non-verbal sound plays an important role in communication between humans
We present two experiments focusing on evaluation of sounds inherent to movements of a NAO robot and discuss how these sounds could be used in blended sonification
Post hoc tests revealed that all sound models significantly increased joyful ratings compared to ratings of the original sound file ( p
Summary
As robots are gradually becoming an integral part of modern society, it becomes increasingly important that these agents can express their internal states through non-verbal communication. The work described in the current paper focuses on sounds of humanoid robots. The work described in this paper was carried out in the context of the SONAO (“Robust non-verbal expression in artificial agents: Identification and modeling of stylized gesture and sound cues”) research project. The SONAO project aims to improve the comprehensibility of robot Non-Verbal Communication (NVC) using data-driven methods and physical acting styles. The purpose is to compensate for limitations in robot communicative channels with an increased clarity of NVC through expressive gestures and non-verbal sounds. Sonification is a rather young discipline focusing on translating data into non-speech sound in a systematic and reproducible way. Interactive Sonification makes use of sound for exploring data in a fast and meaningful way, and it is especially suitable for data that change over time, such as those collected from body movements [7,52]
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