A System for Detecting and Influencing the Emotions of Music in Computer Mediated Performance

Speaker: Steven Livingstone
When: 12:00PM, Thu 29 Sep 2005
Venue: 78-420
Host: Dr Ralf Muhlberger

Abstract:

Music is an immensely powerful affective medium that pervades our everyday life.  With ever advancing technology, the reproduction and application of music for emotive and information transfer purposes has never been more prevalent.  Music performance by computers is increasingly used in computer games for enhancing the ambience of the game environment, and there are other situations outside of gaming where dynamic performance is more applicable than static replay of recorded pieces.

In this seminar I will discuss a rule-based system for influencing the perceived emotions of music.  Based on empirical music psychology, I attempt to formalise the relationship between musical elements and their perceived emotion.  I examine the modification to structural aspects of music to allow for a graduated transition between perceived emotive states.  This mechanism is intended to provide music reproduction systems with a finer grained control over this affective medium; where perceived musical emotion can be influenced with intent.  This intent comes from both an external application and the audience.  Using a series of affective computing technologies, an audienceÕs response metrics and attitudes can be incorporated to model this intent.  A generative feedback loop is setup between the external application, the influencing process and the audienceÕs response to this, which together shape the modification of musical structure.  The effectiveness of influencing perceived musical emotion was examined in work to date, with a small test study providing generally encouraging results.

Biography: See http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~srl