Evaluation of auditory impressions induced by HVAC sound using predictive model

The evaluation of subjective impressions induced by environmental sounds using neurophysiological indices has been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) sounds, and models that predict subjective coolness/preference induced by time-varying HVAC sound from brain activities were constructed. First, magnetoencephalographic (MEG) measurements were carried out to measure brain activities while hearing HVAC sound with paired comparison task. Second, feature vectors representing time-frequency components of brain activities on the whole head were extracted from MEG data using the time-frequency analysis and nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF). And third, two kinds of predictive model were constructed from the brain feature vectors and comparative judgments to pairs of stimuli using a regression model or an SVM-based method. Evaluation experiments show that the SVM-based method is more effective than the regression model.