A proposal for optimization of sign sound using interactive differential evolution

Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) is known as an effective method to create media contents suited to user´s preference and objectives to use. The present study proposed an IEC method that creates sign sounds with interactive differential evolution. In the user´s evaluation, paired comparison was employed: the user selects better one from two presented media contents instead of scoring many solution candidates in a same time. To fundamentally investigate the efficacy of the proposed method, two listening experiments were performed; experiment 1 as comparing experiment and experiment 2 as re-evaluating experiment. Target of the creation with the proposed method was warning sign sounds. Eight males participated as subjects in both experiment. In the result of the experiment 1, gradual decrease of total Euclidean distance between eight DE´s vectors in each generation was observed. In the result of the experiment 2, gradual increase of the subjective fitness value was observed. These results were not significant, however, shrink of searching space and increase of fitness value suggested a possibility of the proposed method to create sign sounds suited to the user.