Basic Semantics of Product Sounds

Elif Özcan, Rene van Egmond

Product experience is a result of sensory and semantic experiences with product properties. In this paper, we focus on the semantic attributes of product sounds and explore the basic components for product sound related semantics using a semantic differential paradigm and factor analysis. With two experiments, we determined eight factors that underlie the semantic associations of product sounds (attention, roughness, smoothness, temporal constancy, (un)familiarity, unpleasantness, machinery, and power). Correlations of the results from both experiments indicate that perceptual factors (attention, roughness, smoothness, and temporal constancy) influence cognitive factors (power, machinery, and (un)familiarity) and emotional factors (unpleasantness).This finding suggests a hierarchical structure in the meaningful associations of product sounds. Furthermore, we have shown that product sound related semantics is sound type dependent.