THE FLOPS GLASS: A DEVICE TO STUDY EMOTIONAL REACTIONS ARISING FROM SONIC INTERACTIONS

This article reports on an experimental study of emotional reactions felt by users manipulating an interactive object augmented with sounds: theFlopsglass. The Flops interface consists of a glass embedded with sensors, which produces impact sounds after it is tilted, implementing the metaphor of the falling of objects out of the glass. The sonic and behavioural design of the glass was conceived specifically for the purpose of studying emotional reactions in sonic interactions. This study is the first of a series. It aims at testing the assumption that emotional reactions are influenced by three parameters of the sounds: spectral centroid, tonality and naturalness. The experimental results reported here confirm the significant influence of perceptual centroid and naturalness, but fail to show an effect of the tonality.

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