Evaluating the Impact of Sound Events’ Rhythm Characteristics to Listener’s Valence

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.