Commercial breaks are often placed at the climax of stories in recent TV programs in Japan, which may cause some serious effects on audiences, especially children, since this practice disturbs the concentrations. The experiment measured the psycho-physiological state of four children before and after commercials. The results showed that the next peak of attention is delayed by distracting the attention.

Our aim is to develop an intuitive sound designing interface for non-expert users. We propose editing sound by sound, which means using vocal mimicking as a "master" to transform the pitch and amplitude envelope. Our technique allows any user to easily and intuitively design sound because it requires no knowledge of acoustic features.

Our aim is to develop an intuitive and effective sound retrieval method for non-expert users. Such a retrieval method should be developed to accommodate a human's perceptual features. We therefore first conducted an experiment to clarify how people represent sound. A participant listens to one sound stimulus and then conveys the sound to a partner. The results indicated that people used mostly verbal description categorized in three groups: the sound itself, the sound's situation, and the sound's impression. Based on these results, we propose three types of keywords: onomatopoeia, sound source, and adjective, which are typical keywords of the above three groups of sound description, for sound retrieval. This retrieval method was implemented for a sound database. Our method can increase the varieties of sounds able to be retrieved and allow users to intuitively search sounds because users can retrieve sounds by using keywords that are most natural to them.