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• DOI: not assigned yet
• Uploaded by: Lorenzo Picinali
• Date (created): 2025-06-30 14:35:26 (GMT)
• Date (updated): 2025-11-05 01:48:09 (GMT)
• Production Year: 2021-2024
• Resource Type: Dataset (SONICOM Ecosystem)
• Rights: CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike
• Subject Areas: Life Science , Other SONICOM Ecosystem
• Abstract: The Corpus collection provides speech from 120 participants reading a fairy tale, enunciating special words, and being interviewed, as well as ratings done by ten listeners per speaker assessing speaker's personality traits and estimating the virtual distance between themselves and the speakers, as well as self-assessment done by both participant groups.
• Methods: Speech: 120 participants (60 females and 60 males) performing the following three tasks:
  1. Read the fairy tale “The North Wind and the Sun” by Aesop: the fairy tale includes all English phonemes and therefore, allows participants to perform analysis over all sounds that can be enunciated in spoken English;
  2. Enunciate the words “blue”, “red”, “yellow”, “green”, “pink”, “brown”, “white”, “black”: the use of the names of colours allows the investigation of the interplay between content (different colours tend to elicit different perceptions) and voice (different speech patterns tend to attract the attribution of different personality traits);
  3. Participate in an interview on selected themes (recordings: Conversational/spontaneous speech)
  Ratings: Independent listeners (ten corresponding to each speaker, five female and five male) assessing:
  1. The personality traits of the speakers based on the recorded speech: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Big 5).
  2. The virtual distance between themselves and the speakers as perceived it in recorded speech.
  Self-assessment: Both sets of participants (speakers and listeners) were asked to complete a self-assessment questionnaire on the following: Aggressiveness, Attractiveness, Competence, Confidence, Dominance, Femininity,
  Likeability, Masculinity, Trustworthiness, Warmth (score range 1-7 along each of the traits).
  
• Technical Remarks: The main peculiarity of this corpus is that the 120 speakers were asked to provide the aforementioned data in three different conditions; namely talking to a person as if this was at a distance of 0.5m, 2m, and 5m. These conditions will result in modifications of the timbre of the voice (as the microphone is always positioned close to the mouth of the speaker), while the simulation of spatial distance cues (e.g., overall level, direct to reflected signal ratio, and alteration of interaural and monoaural spectral cues) has been performed after the recording. This will allow a level of flexibility during the experiments for example, being able to simulate a person talking as if at different distances from the listener. In this way, it will be possible to model the effect of distance on personality perception. In other words, it will be possible to investigate the interplay between proxemics (the domain investigating the social use of space) and personality perception. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a goal is being targeted in the VR community