A New Approach to Associating Human Impressions with Physical Features

A major aim of Kansei engineering is to translate human impressions into physical features of certain objects. When seeing a certain object, different individuals would try to express their impression of it with many different words even if they feel the same emotion for the object. However, no efficient approach to deal with such a large variety of impression words has been proposed so far. The aim of this study is to provide a new method for associating a large variety of impression words with physical features by introducing a new class of impression words called "meta-impressions." A meta-impression is defined as an impression whose relationship to physical features has been revealed in past studies. Focusing on the "music domain," we construct an M-I dictionary that describes the relationship between meta-impressions and various other impression words. The accuracy and applicability of our method are demonstrated experimentally.