While modern sound researchers generally focus on speech and music, mammalian hearing arose from the need to sense those events in the environment that produced sound waves. Such unorganized sound stimuli, referred to as Sound Events (SEs), can also produce an affective and emotional response. In this research, the investigators explore valence recognition of SEs utilizing rhythm-related acoustics cues. A well-known data set with emotionally annotated SEs was employed; various rhythm-related attributes were then extracted and several machine-learning experiments were conducted. The results portray that the rhythm of a SE can affect the listener’s valence up to an extent and, combined with previous works on SEs, could lead to a comprehensive recognition of the rhythm’s effect on the emotional state of the listener.

Emotion recognition from sound signals represents an emerging field of recent research. Although many existingworks focus on emotion recognition from music, there seems to be a relative scarcity of research on emotion recognition fromgeneral sounds. One of the key characteristics of sound events is the sound source spatial position, i.e. the location of the sourcerelatively to the acoustic receiver. Existing studies that aim to investigate the relation of the latter source placement and theelicited emotions are limited to distance, front and back spatial localization and/or specific emotional categories. In this paper we analytically investigate the effect of the source angular position on the listener’s emotional state, modeled in the well–established valence/arousal affective space. Towards this aim, we have developed an annotated sound events dataset using binaural processed versions of the available International Affective Digitized Sound (IADS) sound events library. All subjective affective annotations were obtained using the Self Assessment Manikin (SAM) approach. Preliminary results obtained by processing these annotation scores are likely to indicate a systematic change in the listener affective state as the sound source angular position changes. This trend is more obvious when the sound source is located outside of the visible field of the listener.

Accessible games have been researched and developed for many years, however, blind people still have very limited access and knowledge of them. This can pose a serious limitation, especially for blind children, since in recent years electronic games have become one of the most common and wide spread means of entertainment and socialization. For our implementation we use binaural technology which allows the player to hear and navigate the game space by adding localization information to the game sounds. With our implementation and user studies we provide insight on what constitutes an accessible game for blind people as well as a functional game engine for such games. The game engine developed allows the quick development of games for the visually impaired. Our work provides a good starting point for future developments on the field and, as the user studies show, was very well perceived by the visually impaired children that tried it.