Exploring the taxonomie and associative link between emotion and function for robot sound design

Sound is a medium that conveys functional and emotional information in a form of multilayered streams. With the use of such advantage, robot sound design can open a way for being more efficient communication in human-robot interaction. As the first step of research, we examined how individuals perceived the functional and emotional intention of robot sounds and whether the perceived information from sound is associated with their previous experience with science fiction movies. The sound clips were selected based on the context of the movie scene (i.e., Wall-E, R2-D2, BB8, Transformer) and classified as functional (i.e., platform, monitoring, alerting, feedback) and emotional (i.e., positive, neutral, negative). A total of 12 participants were asked to identify the perceived properties for each of the 30 items. We found that the perceived emotional and functional messages varied from those originally intended and differed by previous experience.