Emotions in everyday sounds. An experimental study on the influence of colour in emotional knocking sounds.

This thesis is an experimental project on sound design, aimed at exploring the world of sound and its artistic and communicative applications concerned with emotion elicitation. When designing any type of communication, whether it is an informative content, a marketing campaign or a multimedia product, it is important to know how to express specific concepts, what their effect on the audience might be and how they can be implemented and reinforced by means of communication tools. Everyday sounds, for instance walking and knocking on a door, are more powerful means of information that one may think. It is this last type of sounds, more precisely knocking sounds, the object of the present study. In particular, it will be discussed the potential sound has, especially when correlated with the elicitation of emotions. The perception of emotions will be studied by means of an empirical experiment aiming at investigating the influence of certain colours, proved to be associated with specific emotions, on emotionally performed knocking sounds. The study hypothesis is that the association between knocking sounds and emotions changes if the knocking sound is performed on a door of a different colour. Our initial hypotheses of colour-emotion associations were: yellow-happiness, grey-sadness, red-anger, and purple-fear. After the analysis of the data gathered through an online questionnaire, only two of our hypotheses were confirmed: happiness and sadness. Anger and fear, on the contrary, did not meet expectations. In the first case, the colour that received a higher score was white (neutral), followed by red and purple. Whereas in the second case, the audio stimuli were averagely confused with anger, independently of the colour. In general, the aural modality prevailed over the visual one. However, colours still influenced the perception of the emotion, even if weakly, especially in the cases of happiness and sadness.