Uncanny Speech - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 218

When ratings for perceived familiarity were
plotted against human-likeness, the results from
Tinwell and Grimshaw's experiment, using 100
participants and 15 videos ranging from human-
oid to human with character vocalization, depict
more than one valley shape. The plot is more
complex than Mori's smooth curve and the valley
shapes less steep than Mori's perpendicular climb.
The most significant valley occurs between the
humanoid character Mario, on the left and the
stylized, human-like Lara Croft, on the right. The
nadir for this valley shape is positioned at about
50-55% human-likeness that is lower than Mori's
original prediction of 80-85% human-likeness.
Results from studies using robots with motion
and speech are also inconsistent with Mori's Un-
canny Valley. MacDorman (2006) plotted ratings
for perceived familiarity against human-likeness
for an experiment using videos of robots from
mechanical to human-like, including some stimuli
with speech. The results showed no significant val-
ley shape in keeping with the depth and gradient
of Mori's plot and that robots rated with the same
degree of human-likeness can have a different rat-
ing for familiarity. Bartnek et al. (2009) found that
when a robotic copy of a human was compared to
that human for the two conditions movement (with
motion and speech) and still , despite a significant
difference in perceived human-likeness between
the human and the android, there was no significant
difference between perceived likeability for the
android and the human. These results imply that
movement may not be the only factor to influence
the uncanny. Further investigation is required
to assess how speech may contribute to a more
multi-dimensional model to measure the uncanny.
Uncertainty exists as to whether the meaning
for Mori's original concept may have been “lost
in translation” (Bartnek et al., 2009, p. 270). The
word that Mori used in the title for the Uncanny
Valley is bukimi , which, translated in Japanese,
stands for “weird, ominous, or eerie”. In English,
“synonyms of uncanny include unfamiliar, eerie,
strange, bizarre, abnormal, alien, creepy, spine

tingling, inducing goose bumps, freakish, ghastly
and horrible” (MacDorman & Ishiguro, 2006, p.
312) while Freud used the word unheimlich to
define the uncanny: Further confusing the issue,
the root heimlich has two meanings viz familiar or
agreeable and that which is concealed and should
be kept from sight. Freud discussed both mean-
ings in his 1919 essay and they are not necessarily
mutually exclusive as we show below. However,
despite a generic understanding for the word
that Mori used, the appropriateness of the term
shinwa-kan , (translated as familiarity ) that Mori
used in his original paper as a variable to measure
and describe uncanniness has been addressed by
previous authors.
As an uncommon word within Japanese culture
there is no direct English equivalent for the word
shinwa-kan. The word familiarity stands for the
opposite to unfamiliarity (one of the synonyms
for bukimi ), yet the word familiarity may be open
to misinterpretation. Whilst strange is a typical
term for describing the unfamiliar, familiarity
might be interpreted with a variety of meanings
including how well-known an object appears:
for example, a well-known character in popular
culture or an android replica of a famous person.
Bartnek et al. (2009) proposed that with no di-
rect translation shinwa-kan could be treated as
a “technical term” in its own right however this
may cause problems when comparing the results
from one experiment to another where the more
generic translation “familiarity” is used as the
dependent variable (p. 271). Other words such
as likeability (Bartnek et al., 2009) or unstrange
(the opposite to strange) may be closer to Mori's
original intention, nevertheless the validity for
experiments conducted into the uncanny may be
more robust if a standard word were to be used
as a dependent variable to measure and describe
perceived uncanniness: that word has yet to be
agreed upon.
Conflicting views exist as to whether it is ac-
tually possible to overcome the Uncanny Valley.
One theory put forward is that objects may appear