When flying robots are used in close-range interaction with humans, the noise they generate, also called consequential sound, is a critical parameter for user acceptance. We conjecture that there is a benefit in adding natural sounds to noisy domestic drones. To test our hypothesis experimentally, we carried out a mixed-methods research study (N=56) on reported user perception of a sonified domestic flying robot with three sound conditions at three distances. The natural sounds studied were respectively added to the robot’s inherent noises during flying; namely a bird song and a rain sound, plus a control condition of no added sound. The distances studied were set according to proxemics; namely near , middle , and far . Our results show that adding bird song or rain sound affects the participants’ perceptions, and the proxemic distances play a nonnegligible role. For instance, we found that participants liked the bird condition the most when the drone was at far , while they disliked the same sound the most when at near . We also found that participants’ perceptions strongly depended on their associations and interpretations deriving from previous experience. We derived six concrete design recommendations.

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