Emotion and Auditory Virtual Environments: Affect-Based Judgments of Music Reproduced with Virtual Reverberation Times

Emotions are experienced both in real and virtual environments (VEs). Most research to date have focused on the content that causes emotional reactions, but noncontent features of a VE (such as the realism and quality of object rendering) may also influence emotional reactions to the mediated object. The present research studied how noncontent features (different reverberation times) of an auditory VE influenced 76 participants' ratings of emotional reactions and expressed emotional qualities of the sounds. The results showed that the two emotion dimensions of pleasantness and arousal were systematically affected if the same musical piece was rendered with different reverberation times. Overall, it was found that high reverberation time was perceived as most unpleasant. Taken together, the results suggested that noncontent features of a VE influence emotional reactions to mediated objects. Moreover, the study suggests that emotional reactions may be a important aspect of the VE experience that can help complementing standard presence questionnaires and quality evaluations.