Abstract
In a previous study, we examined the effects of listening standpoint on the affective evaluation of switch sounds through a psychoacoustical experiment. Three roles of listeners were set in that experiment: operator, active listener, and passive listener. We considered the difference between active and passive listeners’ evaluations to be due to the listeners’ attitude or attention to the sounds. On the other hand, the difference between operators’ and active listeners’ evaluations remains an outstanding question. In order to investigate this question, in this study we conducted an experiment on tactile evaluation of the same 15 switches as in the previous study. The experiment was carried out using the semantic differential (SD) method involving 14 adjective pairs with a 5-point category scale. Twenty-seven subjects, who were the operators in the previous experiment, participated in this experiment. The experimental results were analyzed using factor analysis; we obtained three factors of activity, evaluation, and potency. The three factor scores of the operators’ auditory evaluation obtained in the previous study are estimated well by linear regressions with the factor scores of the active listeners’ auditory evaluation and the operators’ tactile evaluation. The results of regression analysis indicate that that operator’s evaluation of switch sounds is based on the auditory evaluation and affected by the evaluation of tactile feedback.
