Knocking Sound Effects With Emotional Intentions

The dataset was recorded by the professional foley artist Ulf Olausson at the FoleyWorks (http://foleyworks.se/) studios in Stockholm on the 15th October, 2019. Inspired by previous work on knocking sounds [1]. we chose five type of emotions to be portrayed in the dataset: anger, fear, happiness, neutral and sadness.

In order to imagine a situation where the knocking action is performed with a particular emotional intention, we provided the foley artist with common situations where these actions can happen. The emotions, alongside the context are the following:

• Anger: telling a flatmate for the 4th time to turn down the very loud music.
• Fear: alerting a neighbor of a possible risk.
• Happiness: telling a flatmate you won a prize.
• Neutral: parcel delivery.
• Sadness: telling a friend someone passed away.

We also encouraged the foley artist to perform diverse interpretations of the context provided in order to have a wider variety of sounds. The dataset was recorded with a Rode NT1 microphone, performing the knocks to a closed door.

We recorded a total of 600 knocking actions (120 actions per category). An action is a sequence of individual knocks. We discarded 20 actions per category to filter out unwanted noise. The final 500 audio files were edited only to trim the audio so each file starts on the first knock onset and finish on the last knock decay. 

[1] R. Vitale and R. Bresin, “Emotional Cues in Knocking Sounds,” in 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Sapporo, Japan, August 25-29, 2008, 2008, p. 276.