Expressing Emotions With Synthetic Affect Bursts

In this paper we introduce the idea of anthropomorphic auditory icons, which are synthetic affect bursts that can be used in entertainment scenarios and other interactive systems to display emotional states of game characters, animated animals, robots or other anthropomorphic objects. We describe a novel method to construct this type of auditory icons, which basically involves the principle of vocoding on existing recordings of human affect bursts as modulating sounds and arbitrary synthetic sounds as carriers. In this way we are able to use a single custom sound to generate a set of synthetic affect bursts with similar sound characteristics as the original sound sample. We further present findings of a first user study exploring the recognition efficiency of emotions in synthetic affect bursts created with this method.