Abstract
Research has been conducted to examine the effects of mechanical and sound characteristics of fabrics on affective quality. The present study developed the Affective Quality Evaluation and Estimation System for Textiles (AQEEST) with distinguished features that can be effectively used in the affective research of fabric frictional sound. The AQEEST consists of three subsystems (affective quality evaluation, affective quality estimation, and audible distance estimation subsystems) and each subsystem consists of three to four modules (e.g., evaluation condition setup, evaluation experimentation, and textile database management modules) depending on its functional requirements. The affective quality evaluation subsystem was designed to help administer an experiment in a systematic manner and present acoustic and visual stimuli simultaneously in various gait conditions (walking, jogging, and running) to mimic a more realistic situation of textile frictional sound production. Next, the affective quality estimation subsystem was designed to estimate the sound characteristics, affective qualities, overall psychological satisfaction, and reference cluster of a textile using its mechanical and/or sound characteristic information. Lastly, the audible distance estimation subsystem was designed to estimate the just noticeable sound pressure levels and audible distances of a textile for various gait conditions using its mechanical characteristic information. The AQEEST can be upgraded by accommodating more affective quality study results for various textiles.