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.

Modern interactive means combined with new digital media processing and representation technologies can provide a robust framework for enhancing user experience in multimedia entertainment systems and audiovisual artistic installations with non-traditional interaction/feedback paths based on user affective state. In this work, the ‘Elevator’ interactive audiovisual platform prototype is presented, which aims to provide a framework for signalling and expressing human behaviour related to emotions (such as anger) and finally produce a visual outcome of this behaviour, defined here as the emotional ‘thumbnail’ of the user. Optimised, real-time audio signal processing techniques are employed for monitoring the achieved anger-like behaviour, while the emotional elevation is attempted using appropriately selected combined audio/visual content reproduced using state-of-the-art audiovisual playback technologies that allow the creation of a realistic immersive audiovisual environment. The demonstration of the proposed prototype has shown that affective interaction is possible, allowing the further development of relative artistic and technological applications.