The influence of affective voice on sound distance perception (vor Ort)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Emotions bias perception. Previous studies have mostly investigated perceptual biases in the visual domain, while the impact of emotions on perception in the auditory domain remains less clear. The goal of the present study was to investigate the influence of affective voice on sound distance perception in Virtual Reality. During the experiment, participants wore a head mounted display on which a virtual classroom was visually rendered. Sound stimuli (words) were played from four real loudspeakers located at distinct, frontal positions in the laboratory (unseen by the participants). Participants had to place a virtual agent or a virtual loudspeaker at the perceived location of the sound source. As experimental manipulation, word stimuli were spoken either with an angry or neutral voice, and presented at two different sound levels. Distances between participants and the estimated sound locations as well as distances between the estimated location and the actual loudspeaker position were measured as dependent variables. We hypothesized that angry voices are placed closer to the participants than neutral voices and that this effect is more pronounced when distance estimates are given for human agents in comparison to loudspeakers.